Re: [RFC PATCH] ext4: increase the protection of drop nlink and ext4 inode destroy

[Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 12:03:28PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 04:00:16PM +0800, zhangyi (F) wrote:
> > 
> > At the same time, I think other file systems may have the same problem, do
> > you think we should put these detections on the VFS layer? Thus other file
> > systems no need to do the same things, but the disadvantage is that we can
> > not call ext4_error to report ext4 inconsistency.
> 
> There are file systems which don't have inodes per-se where the
> i_nlinks could be a something which is simulated by the file system.
> So it's not *necessarily* an on-disk inconsistency.
> 
> We'll have to see if Al and other file system developers are
> agreeable, but one thing that we could do is to do the detection in
> the VFS layer (which it is actually easier to do), and if they find an
> issue, they can just pass a report via a callback function found in
> the struct_operations structure.  If there isn't such a function
> defined, or the function returns 0, the VFS could just do nothing; if
> it returns an error code, then that would get reflected back up to
> userspace, plus whatever other action the file system sees fit to do.

	Detection of what?  Zero ->i_nlink on inode of dentry that passes e.g.
may_delete()?