Re: [PATCH, RFC] directory offset overflows in 2.6.28

Dave Chinner
2008-12-30T23:39:57Z

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 10:57:26AM -0500, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 11:11:17AM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 05:07:45PM -0500, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > > The patch below is a dumb version of just putting back the masking,
> > > to make sure we have the same behavior as in 2.6.27 and earlier.
> > > I think we should at least hide it in a macro that is well-commented,
> > > but I suspect we also need to make sure that we never ever get bigger
> > > offsets in directories in some way.
> >
> > I think we need that macro sooner rather than later ;)
>
> > In this case, you can do the masking at the time cook is
> > assigned. I haven't checked, but I suspect the rest will be the
> > same. That will make the patch less invasive and with a macro
> > somewhat cleaner...
>
> That way we could replace two assignment by one one time each
> in xfs_dir2_leaf.c and xfs_dir2_block.c.
>
> I started working on the macro, but it seems even more hacky.
>
> When looking at the big picture we have two problems:
>
> - the end of directory marker which always seems to be always too
> large for 32bit values for 32 bit indices
> - directories that actually are too large to be represented using
> 32 bit signed offsets. I guess we just can't support those
> for apps using the 32bit readdir interface and the EOVERFLOW
> is valid for those. The current approach as in < 2.6.28 and
> with this patch breaks that second case in subtile ways.
>
> So, I'd just push the first hacky opencoded patch into 2.6.29 and
> -stable now to revert to the old behaviour with all it's faults, and
> in the meantime I'll look into a proper way finding a better end of
> directory indicator. That should also help Russell's BSD concerns.

Ok, sounds like a plan.

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com