Re: [PATCH] vfs: fix race in rcu lookup of pruned dentry

Al Viro
2011-07-19T23:52:20Z

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:45:51AM +0100, Al Viro wrote:

> You know what... I doubt that you want to mess with ->d_seq checks here.
> It's definitely not Hugh's bug (unless he has bindings somewhere odd) and
> both ->mnt_mountpoint and ->mnt_root are pinned (and we are holding
> vfsmount_lock anyway). *inode assignment too early is a real bug, indeed,
> and we want to assign nd->seq if we cross mountpoint as both versions do,
> but check just before that is, in the best case, BUG_ON() fodder. We'd
> just found a vfsmount with ->mnt_mountpoint equal to path->dentry; it *can't*
> be stale, or we have a really nasty problem anyway.

Kudos to neilb for spotting the pointless check, BTW; and no, his theory
that it might be needed since we could race with umount() is wrong - due to
vfsmount_lock being held.