hi folks, i already posted this to the kernel mailing list a few days ago but nobody there seems to be interested in what i found out. since i believe this is a serious bug, i'm posting my perception again... the bug is about the handling of bad inodes in at least the 2.4.16, .17, .18-pre9 and .9 kernel releases (i suspect all 2.4 kernels are affected) and causes the names_cache to get confused. however, it is actually not a bug in ext[23] but in vfs layer. you can easily reproduce this effect by making an inode bad using debugfs (or using a bad one if you have, of course) and open() it with the flag O_CREAT set. watching /proc/slabinfo will show you the weirdness. consider /tmp/bad is a bad inode: # cd /tmp # ls | grep bad bad # cat bad cat: bad: Input/output error # cat /proc/slabinfo | grep names names_cache 0 2 4096 0 2 1 : 2 333 2 0 0 # echo foo >bad sh: bad: Input/output error # cat /proc/slabinfo | grep names names_cache 4294967295 2 4096 1 2 1 boom! 4294967295 == (unsigned long) -1, the cache length is growing backwards. this "echo foo >bad" opens the file with O_CREAT set which forces the effect. what confuses me is that the system remains stable after that happened, the only effect i got was that i wasn't able to rename() a file on any filesystem anymore. what the rename() syscall does on kernel side is getting memory from the names_cache twice by calling __getname() which gives out the same pointer twice when the kernel is poisoned this way. anyway, it's an ugly bug that needs to get fixed. the bug is most likely in fs/namei.c, open_namei() - at least i fixed my machine here with this: --- linux-2.4.17-orig/fs/namei.c Wed Oct 17 23:46:29 2001 +++ linux-2.4.17-uml/fs/namei.c Fri Feb 8 02:53:36 2002 @@ -1052,6 +1052,11 @@ error = -ENOENT; if (!dentry->d_inode) goto exit_dput; + + error = -EIO; + if (is_bad_inode(dentry->d_inode)) + goto exit_dput; + if (dentry->d_inode->i_op && dentry->d_inode->i_op->follow_link) goto do_link; an open() does not make any sense on a bad inode so i see no reason for not breaking the branch at this point. any comments? please let me know if you're able to trigger this effect on older 2.4 kernels. btw, version 2.2.19 is not tainted. greets, daniel --
