Filesystems which detect symlinks with append/immutable should inform users their filesystem is corrupted and their respective filesystem checker tool should fix this. In lieu of this though users may be stuck with pesky files or directories which they cannot remove. We cannot expect all filesystems to be updated to address this, so since the VFS does not let filesystems set these attributes -- let the VFS enable users to remove symlink with these attributes, but also provide a fallback warning, in case the users's own filesystem does not catch it. Sending again as RFC as this just goes compile tested so far, and it is still unclear if this is the direction we want to go with this. v2: As per Darrick, even though the VFS should probably allow not so popular filesystems to delete corrupt symlinks with append/immutable -- popular filesystems should check for this themselves and inform the users of corruption. These filesystems should have their respective filesystem checker tools updated to correct this as well. v1: Sent out a single patch just to ignore the append/immutable attributes set on symlinks. Luis R. Rodriguez (4): vfs: skip extra attributes check on removal for symlinks xfs: add verifier check for symlink with append/immutable flags ext4: add verifier check for symlink with append/immutable flags btrfs: verify symlinks with append/immutable flags fs/btrfs/inode.c | 9 +++++++++ fs/ext4/inode.c | 7 +++++++ fs/namei.c | 24 ++++++++++++++++++++++-- fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_symlink_remote.c | 5 +++++ 4 files changed, 43 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) -- 2.17.0
