ext4: return -EIO not -ESTALE on directory traversal through deleted inode

ext4_iget() returns -ESTALE if invoked on a deleted inode, in order to
report errors to NFS properly.  However, in ext4_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 ext4_lookup to return -EIO if it receives
-ESTALE from ext4_iget(), as ext4 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: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/fs/ext4/namei.c b/fs/ext4/namei.c
index a5ba1a8..6e1ad68 100644
--- a/fs/ext4/namei.c
+++ b/fs/ext4/namei.c
@@ -1077,8 +1077,16 @@ static struct dentry *ext4_lookup(struct inode *dir, struct dentry *dentry, stru
 			return ERR_PTR(-EIO);
 		}
 		inode = ext4_iget(dir->i_sb, ino);
-		if (IS_ERR(inode))
-			return ERR_CAST(inode);
+		if (unlikely(IS_ERR(inode))) {
+			if (PTR_ERR(inode) == -ESTALE) {
+				ext4_error(dir->i_sb, __func__,
+						"deleted inode referenced: %u",
+						ino);
+				return ERR_PTR(-EIO);
+			} else {
+				return ERR_CAST(inode);
+			}
+		}
 	}
 	return d_splice_alias(inode, dentry);
 }