[PATCH] ext3/EA: Race in ext[23] xattr sharing code
Andrew Tridgell and Stephen C. Tweedie have reported two different Oopses caused by a race condition in the mbcache, which is responsible for extended attribute sharing in ext2 and ext3. Stephen tracked down the bug; I did the fix. Explanation: The mbcache caches the locations and content hashes of xattr blocks. There are two access strategies: [1] xattr block disposal via mb_cache_entry_get(), [2] xattr block reuse (sharing) via mb_cache_entry_find_{first,next}(). There is no locking between the two methods, so between one mb_cache_entry_find_x and the next, a mb_cache_entry_get might come in, unhash the cache entry, and change the journaling state of the xattr buffer. Subsequently, two things can happen: [a] the next mb_cache_entry_find_x may try to follow the mbcache hash chain starting from the entry that has become unhashed, which now is a stale pointer, [b] the block may have become deallocated, and then we try to reuse it. Fix this by converting the mbcache into a readers-writer style lock, and protect all block accesses in ext2/ext3 by the mbcache entry lock. This ensures that destroying blocks is an exclusive operation that may not overlap xattr block reuse, while allowing multiple "re-users". Write access to the xattr block's buffer is protected by the buffer lock. Signed-off-by: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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