On Thu, Sep 28, 2023 at 02:11:29PM +0100, Luís Henriques wrote: > Because inode is being initialised before checking if dentry is negative, > and the ihold() is only done if the dentry is *not* negative, the cleanup > code may end-up doing an extra iput() on that inode. > > Fixes: b18825a7c8e3 ("VFS: Put a small type field into struct dentry::d_flags") > Signed-off-by: Luís Henriques <lhenriques@xxxxxxx> > --- > Hi! > > I was going to also remove the 'if (inode)' before the 'iput(inode)', > because 'iput()' already checks for NULL anyway. But since I probably > wouldn't have caught this bug if it wasn't for that 'if', I decided to > keep it there. But I can send v2 with that change too if you prefer. > > Cheers, > -- > Luís > > fs/namei.c | 4 +--- > 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 3 deletions(-) > > diff --git a/fs/namei.c b/fs/namei.c > index 567ee547492b..156a570d7831 100644 > --- a/fs/namei.c > +++ b/fs/namei.c > @@ -4386,11 +4386,9 @@ int do_unlinkat(int dfd, struct filename *name) > if (!IS_ERR(dentry)) { > > /* Why not before? Because we want correct error value */ > - if (last.name[last.len]) > + if (last.name[last.len] || d_is_negative(dentry)) > goto slashes; > inode = dentry->d_inode; > - if (d_is_negative(dentry)) > - goto slashes; > ihold(inode); > error = security_path_unlink(&path, dentry); > if (error) I ran into this myself, but I'm pretty sure there is no bug here. The code is just incredibly misleading and it became this way from the sweeping change introducing d_is_negative. I could not be bothered to argue about patching it so I did not do anything. ;) AFAICS it is an invariant that d_is_negative passes iff d_inode is NULL. Personally I support the patch, but commit message needs to stop claiming a bug.