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  • Bryan Donlan's avatar
    ext3: return -EIO not -ESTALE on directory traversal through deleted inode · de18f3b2
    Bryan Donlan authored
    
    
    ext3_iget() returns -ESTALE if invoked on a deleted inode, in order to
    report errors to NFS properly.  However, in ext[234]_lookup(), this
    -ESTALE can be propagated to userspace if the filesystem is corrupted such
    that a directory entry references a deleted inode.  This leads to a
    misleading error message - "Stale NFS file handle" - and confusion on the
    part of the admin.
    
    The bug can be easily reproduced by creating a new filesystem, making a
    link to an unused inode using debugfs, then mounting and attempting to ls
    -l said link.
    
    This patch thus changes ext3_lookup to return -EIO if it receives -ESTALE
    from ext3_iget(), as ext3 does for other filesystem metadata corruption;
    and also invokes the appropriate ext*_error functions when this case is
    detected.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarBryan Donlan <bdonlan@gmail.com>
    Cc: <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    de18f3b2