journal_start_commit() returns 1 if either a transaction is committing or
the function has queued a transaction commit. But it returns 0 if we
raced with somebody queueing the transaction commit as well. This
resulted in ext3_sync_fs() not functioning correctly (description from
Arthur Jones): In the case of a data=ordered umount with pending long
symlinks which are delayed due to a long list of other I/O on the backing
block device, this causes the buffer associated with the long symlinks to
not be moved to the inode dirty list in the second phase of fsync_super.
Then, before they can be dirtied again, kjournald exits, seeing the UMOUNT
flag and the dirty pages are never written to the backing block device,
causing long symlink corruption and exposing new or previously freed block
data to userspace.
This can be reproduced with a script created by Eric Sandeen
<sandeen@redhat.com>:
#!/bin/bash
umount /mnt/test2
mount /dev/sdb4 /mnt/test2
rm -f /mnt/test2/*
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test2/bigfile bs=1M count=512
touch /mnt/test2/thisisveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryverylongfilename
ln -s /mnt/test2/thisisveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryveryverylongfilename
/mnt/test2/link
umount /mnt/test2
mount /dev/sdb4 /mnt/test2
ls /mnt/test2/
This patch fixes journal_start_commit() to always return 1 when there's
a transaction committing or queued for commit.
Cc: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com> Cc: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@gmail.com> Cc: <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>