A change was made to ext3 in 2.4.20-pre9 which will cause the filesystem to run ext3_mark_inode_dirty() against a freed inode. This will occur when an application attempts to add a new file/directory to the filesystem and encounters space or inode exhaustion. The results of this are unpredictable. Usually, nothing happens. But it can cause random memory corruption on SMP, and the kernel will crash if compiled for "debug memory allocations". The problem is that ext3_add_nondir() will do an iput() of the inode on error (which frees the inode) but we then run ext3_mark_inode_dirty() against it. Fix it so that we only run ext3_mark_inode_dirty() if the inode was successfully instantiated. fs/ext3/namei.c | 11 +++++------ 1 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) --- 24/fs/ext3/namei.c~ext3-use-after-free Sun Dec 15 11:27:50 2002 +++ 24-akpm/fs/ext3/namei.c Sun Dec 15 11:27:50 2002 @@ -429,8 +429,11 @@ static int ext3_add_nondir(handle_t *han { int err = ext3_add_entry(handle, dentry, inode); if (!err) { - d_instantiate(dentry, inode); - return 0; + err = ext3_mark_inode_dirty(handle, inode); + if (err == 0) { + d_instantiate(dentry, inode); + return 0; + } } ext3_dec_count(handle, inode); iput(inode); @@ -465,7 +468,6 @@ static int ext3_create (struct inode * d inode->i_fop = &ext3_file_operations; inode->i_mapping->a_ops = &ext3_aops; err = ext3_add_nondir(handle, dentry, inode); - ext3_mark_inode_dirty(handle, inode); } ext3_journal_stop(handle, dir); return err; @@ -490,7 +492,6 @@ static int ext3_mknod (struct inode * di if (!IS_ERR(inode)) { init_special_inode(inode, mode, rdev); err = ext3_add_nondir(handle, dentry, inode); - ext3_mark_inode_dirty(handle, inode); } ext3_journal_stop(handle, dir); return err; @@ -934,7 +935,6 @@ static int ext3_symlink (struct inode * } inode->u.ext3_i.i_disksize = inode->i_size; err = ext3_add_nondir(handle, dentry, inode); - ext3_mark_inode_dirty(handle, inode); out_stop: ext3_journal_stop(handle, dir); return err; @@ -971,7 +971,6 @@ static int ext3_link (struct dentry * ol atomic_inc(&inode->i_count); err = ext3_add_nondir(handle, dentry, inode); - ext3_mark_inode_dirty(handle, inode); ext3_journal_stop(handle, dir); return err; } _ _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users