On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 10:20:07PM +0100, Al Viro wrote: > I agree that unlazy_walk() attempted when walking a symlink ought to fail > with -ECHILD; we can't legitimize the symlink itself, so once we are out > of RCU mode, there's nothing to hold the inode of symlink (and its body) > from getting freed. Solution is wrong though; for example, when > nested symlink occurs in the middle of a trailing one, we should *not* > remove the flag upon leaving the nested symlink. > > Another unpleasant thing is that ->follow_link() saying "can't do that in > RCU mode" ends up with restart from scratch - that actually risks to be > worse than the mainline; there we would attempt unlazy_walk() and normally > it would've succeed. > > AFAICS, the real rule is "can't unlazy if nd->last.name points into a symlink > body and we might still need to access it"... And one more: may_follow_link() is now potentially oopsable. Look: suppose we've reached the link in RCU mode, just as it got unlinked. link->dentry has become negative and may_follow_link() steps into /* Allowed if owner and follower match. */ inode = link->dentry->d_inode; if (uid_eq(current_cred()->fsuid, inode->i_uid)) return 0; Oops... Incidentally, I suspect that your __read_seqcount_retry() in follow_link() might be lacking a barrier; why isn't full read_seqcount_retry() needed? FWIW, I would rather fetch ->d_inode *and* checked ->seq proir to calling get_link(), and passed inode to it as an explicit argument. And passed it to may_follow_link() as well... -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html