From: Josef Bacik <josef@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> commit d62b23c94952e78211a383b7d90ef0afbd9a3717 upstream. If we abort a transaction we have the following sequence if (!trans->dirty && list_empty(&trans->new_bgs)) return; WRITE_ONCE(trans->transaction->aborted, err); The idea being if we didn't modify anything with our trans handle then we don't really need to abort the whole transaction, maybe the other trans handles are fine and we can carry on. However in the case of create_snapshot we add a pending_snapshot object to our transaction and then commit the transaction. We don't actually modify anything. sync() behaves the same way, attach to an existing transaction and commit it. This means that if we have an IO error in the right places we could abort the committing transaction with our trans->dirty being not set and thus not set transaction->aborted. This is a problem because in the create_snapshot() case we depend on pending->error being set to something, or btrfs_commit_transaction returning an error. If we are not the trans handle that gets to commit the transaction, and we're waiting on the commit to happen we get our return value from cur_trans->aborted. If this was not set to anything because sync() hit an error in the transaction commit before it could modify anything then cur_trans->aborted would be 0. Thus we'd return 0 from btrfs_commit_transaction() in create_snapshot. This is a problem because we then try to do things with pending_snapshot->snap, which will be NULL because we didn't create the snapshot, and then we'll get a NULL pointer dereference like the following "BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 00000000000001f0" RIP: 0010:btrfs_orphan_cleanup+0x2d/0x330 Call Trace: ? btrfs_mksubvol.isra.31+0x3f2/0x510 btrfs_mksubvol.isra.31+0x4bc/0x510 ? __sb_start_write+0xfa/0x200 ? mnt_want_write_file+0x24/0x50 btrfs_ioctl_snap_create_transid+0x16c/0x1a0 btrfs_ioctl_snap_create_v2+0x11e/0x1a0 btrfs_ioctl+0x1534/0x2c10 ? free_debug_processing+0x262/0x2a3 do_vfs_ioctl+0xa6/0x6b0 ? do_sys_open+0x188/0x220 ? syscall_trace_enter+0x1f8/0x330 ksys_ioctl+0x60/0x90 __x64_sys_ioctl+0x16/0x20 do_syscall_64+0x4a/0x1b0 In order to fix this we need to make sure anybody who calls commit_transaction has trans->dirty set so that they properly set the trans->transaction->aborted value properly so any waiters know bad things happened. This was found while I was running generic/475 with my modified fsstress, it reproduced within a few runs. I ran with this patch all night and didn't see the problem again. CC: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx # 4.4+ Signed-off-by: Josef Bacik <josef@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: David Sterba <dsterba@xxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: David Sterba <dsterba@xxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- fs/btrfs/transaction.c | 8 ++++++++ 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+) --- a/fs/btrfs/transaction.c +++ b/fs/btrfs/transaction.c @@ -1948,6 +1948,14 @@ int btrfs_commit_transaction(struct btrf struct btrfs_transaction *prev_trans = NULL; int ret; + /* + * Some places just start a transaction to commit it. We need to make + * sure that if this commit fails that the abort code actually marks the + * transaction as failed, so set trans->dirty to make the abort code do + * the right thing. + */ + trans->dirty = true; + /* Stop the commit early if ->aborted is set */ if (unlikely(READ_ONCE(cur_trans->aborted))) { ret = cur_trans->aborted;