Normally opening a file, unlinking it and then closing will have the inode freed upon close() (provided that it's not otherwise busy and has no remaining links, of course). However, there's one case where that does *not* happen. Namely, if you open it by fhandle with cold dcache, then unlink() and close(). In normal case you get d_delete() in unlink(2) notice that dentry is busy and unhash it; on the final dput() it will be forcibly evicted from dcache, triggering iput() and inode removal. In this case, though, we end up with *two* dentries - disconnected (created by open-by-fhandle) and regular one (used by unlink()). The latter will have its reference to inode dropped just fine, but the former will not - it's considered hashed (it is on the ->s_anon list), so it will stay around until the memory pressure will finally do it in. As the result, we have the final iput() delayed indefinitely. It's trivial to reproduce - #define _GNU_SOURCE #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/stat.h> #include <fcntl.h> void flush_dcache(void) { system("mount -o remount,rw /"); } static char buf[20 * 1024 * 1024]; main() { int fd; union { struct file_handle f; char buf[MAX_HANDLE_SZ]; } x; int m; x.f.handle_bytes = sizeof(x); chdir("/root"); mkdir("foo", 0700); fd = open("foo/bar", O_CREAT | O_RDWR, 0600); close(fd); name_to_handle_at(AT_FDCWD, "foo/bar", &x.f, &m, 0); flush_dcache(); fd = open_by_handle_at(AT_FDCWD, &x.f, O_RDWR); unlink("foo/bar"); write(fd, buf, sizeof(buf)); system("df ."); /* 20Mb eaten */ close(fd); system("df ."); /* should've freed those 20Mb */ flush_dcache(); system("df ."); /* should be the same as #2 */ } will spit out something like Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/root 322023 303843 1131 100% / Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/root 322023 303843 1131 100% / Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/root 322023 283282 21692 93% / - inode gets freed only when dentry is finally evicted (here we trigger than by remount; normally it would've happened in response to memory pressure hell knows when). IMO it's a bug. Between the close() and final flush_dcache() the file has no surviving links, is *not* busy, won't show up in fuser/lsof/whatnot output, and yet it's still not freed. I'm not saying that it's realistically exploitable (albeit with nfsd it might be), but it's a very unpleasant self-LART. FWIW, my prefered fix would be simply to have the final dput() treat disconnected dentries as "kill on sight"; checking for i_nlink of the inode, as Bruce suggested several years ago, will *not* work, simply because having another link to that file and unlinking it after close will reproduce the situation - disconnected dentry sticks around in dcache past its final dput() and past the last unlink() of our file. Theoretically it might cause an overhead for nfsd (no_subtree_check v3 export might see more d_alloc()/d_free(); icache retention will still prevent constant rereading the inode from disk). _IF_ that proves to be noticable, we might need to come up with something more elaborate (e.g. have unlink() and rename() kick disconnected aliases out if the link count has reached 0), but it's more complex and needs careful ananlysis of correctness - we need to prove that there's no way to miss the link count reaching 0. I would prefer to treat all disconnected as unhashed for dcache retention purposes - it's simpler and less brittle. Comments? I mean something like this: diff --git a/fs/dcache.c b/fs/dcache.c index 7a3f3e5..5c8ea15 100644 --- a/fs/dcache.c +++ b/fs/dcache.c @@ -642,7 +642,7 @@ static inline bool fast_dput(struct dentry *dentry) /* * If we have a d_op->d_delete() operation, we sould not - * let the dentry count go to zero, so use "put__or_lock". + * let the dentry count go to zero, so use "put_or_lock". */ if (unlikely(dentry->d_flags & DCACHE_OP_DELETE)) return lockref_put_or_lock(&dentry->d_lockref); @@ -697,7 +697,7 @@ static inline bool fast_dput(struct dentry *dentry) */ smp_rmb(); d_flags = ACCESS_ONCE(dentry->d_flags); - d_flags &= DCACHE_REFERENCED | DCACHE_LRU_LIST; + d_flags &= DCACHE_REFERENCED | DCACHE_LRU_LIST | DCACHE_DISCONNECTED; /* Nothing to do? Dropping the reference was all we needed? */ if (d_flags == (DCACHE_REFERENCED | DCACHE_LRU_LIST) && !d_unhashed(dentry)) @@ -776,6 +776,9 @@ repeat: if (unlikely(d_unhashed(dentry))) goto kill_it; + if (unlikely(dentry->d_flags & DCACHE_DISCONNECTED)) + goto kill_it; + if (unlikely(dentry->d_flags & DCACHE_OP_DELETE)) { if (dentry->d_op->d_delete(dentry)) goto kill_it; -- 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