ext3: return -EIO not -ESTALE on directory traversal through deleted inode

ext3_iget() returns -ESTALE if invoked on a deleted inode, in order to
report errors to NFS properly.  However, in ext[234]_lookup(), this
-ESTALE can be propagated to userspace if the filesystem is corrupted such
that a directory entry references a deleted inode.  This leads to a
misleading error message - "Stale NFS file handle" - and confusion on the
part of the admin.

The bug can be easily reproduced by creating a new filesystem, making a
link to an unused inode using debugfs, then mounting and attempting to ls
-l said link.

This patch thus changes ext3_lookup to return -EIO if it receives -ESTALE
from ext3_iget(), as ext3 does for other filesystem metadata corruption;
and also invokes the appropriate ext*_error functions when this case is
detected.

Signed-off-by: Bryan Donlan <bdonlan@gmail.com>
Cc: <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/fs/ext3/namei.c b/fs/ext3/namei.c
index bd87a60..6ddaa0a 100644
--- a/fs/ext3/namei.c
+++ b/fs/ext3/namei.c
@@ -1047,8 +1047,16 @@ static struct dentry *ext3_lookup(struct inode * dir, struct dentry *dentry, str
 			return ERR_PTR(-EIO);
 		}
 		inode = ext3_iget(dir->i_sb, ino);
-		if (IS_ERR(inode))
-			return ERR_CAST(inode);
+		if (unlikely(IS_ERR(inode))) {
+			if (PTR_ERR(inode) == -ESTALE) {
+				ext3_error(dir->i_sb, __func__,
+						"deleted inode referenced: %lu",
+						ino);
+				return ERR_PTR(-EIO);
+			} else {
+				return ERR_CAST(inode);
+			}
+		}
 	}
 	return d_splice_alias(inode, dentry);
 }