On Sun, Dec 24, 2023 at 09:11:36PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Mon, Dec 25, 2023 at 09:38:51AM +0800, Baokun Li wrote: > > Marking the boot loader inode as a bad inode here is useless, > > EXT4_IGET_BAD allows us to get a bad boot loader inode. > > In my opinion, it doesn't make sense to call lock_two_nondirectories() > > here to determine if the inode is a regular file or not, since the logic > > for dealing with non-regular files comes after the locking, so calling > > lock_two_inodes() directly here will suffice. > > This is all very silly, and why I consider this sort of thing pure > syzkaller noise. It really doesn't protect against any real threat, > and it encourages people to put all sorts of random crud in kernel > code, all in the name of trying to shut up syzbot. > > If we *are* going to care about shutting up syzkaller, the right > approach is to simply add a check in swap_inode_boot_loader() which > causes it to call ext4_error() and declare the file system corrupted > if the bootloader inode is not a regular file, and then return > -EFSCORRUPTED. > > We don't need to add random hacks to ext4_iget(), or in other places... Just check the inode type before anything else and be done with that - if an in-core inode of a regular file manages to become a directory right under us, we have a much worse problem. IOW, the bug is real, but suggested patch is just plain wrong.