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  • Anton Altaparmakov's avatar
    [PATCH] Bug in error recovery in fs/buffer.c::__block_prepare_write() · 152becd2
    Anton Altaparmakov authored
    
    
    fs/buffer.c::__block_prepare_write() has broken error recovery.  It calls
    the get_block() callback with "create = 1" and if that succeeds it
    immediately clears buffer_new on the just allocated buffer (which has
    buffer_new set).
    
    The bug is that if an error occurs and get_block() returns != 0, we break
    from this loop and go into recovery code.  This code has this comment:
    
    /* Error case: */
    /*
     * Zero out any newly allocated blocks to avoid exposing stale
     * data.  If BH_New is set, we know that the block was newly
     * allocated in the above loop.
     */
    
    So the intent is obviously good in that it wants to clear just allocated
    and hence not zeroed buffers.  However the code recognises allocated
    buffers by checking for buffer_new being set.
    
    Unfortunately __block_prepare_write() as discussed above already cleared
    buffer_new on all allocated buffers thus no buffers will be cleared during
    error recovery and old data will be leaked.
    
    The simplest way I can see to fix this is to make the current recovery code
    work by _not_ clearing buffer_new after calling get_block() in
    __block_prepare_write().
    
    We cannot safely allow buffer_new buffers to "leak out" of
    __block_prepare_write(), thus we simply do a quick loop over the buffers
    clearing buffer_new on each of them if it is set just before returning
    "success" from __block_prepare_write().
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAnton Altaparmakov <aia21@cantab.net>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    152becd2