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>