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Commit 58c90473 authored by Dave Chinner's avatar Dave Chinner Committed by Dave Chinner
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xfs: inodes are new until the dentry cache is set up



Al Viro noticed a generic set of issues to do with filehandle lookup
racing with dentry cache setup. They involve a filehandle lookup
occurring while an inode is being created and the filehandle lookup
racing with the dentry creation for the real file. This can lead to
multiple dentries for the one path being instantiated. There are a
host of other issues around this same set of paths.

The underlying cause is that file handle lookup only waits on inode
cache instantiation rather than full dentry cache instantiation. XFS
is mostly immune to the problems discovered due to it's own internal
inode cache, but there are a couple of corner cases where races can
happen.

We currently clear the XFS_INEW flag when the inode is fully set up
after insertion into the cache. Newly allocated inodes are inserted
locked and so aren't usable until the allocation transaction
commits. This, however, occurs before the dentry and security
information is fully initialised and hence the inode is unlocked and
available for lookups to find too early.

To solve the problem, only clear the XFS_INEW flag for newly created
inodes once the dentry is fully instantiated. This means lookups
will retry until the XFS_INEW flag is removed from the inode and
hence avoids the race conditions in questions.

THis also means that xfs_create(), xfs_create_tmpfile() and
xfs_symlink() need to finish the setup of the inode in their error
paths if we had allocated the inode but failed later in the creation
process. xfs_symlink(), in particular, needed a lot of help to make
it's error handling match that of xfs_create().

Signed-off-by: default avatarDave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarBrian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
parent c517d838
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