namei: results of d_is_negative() should be checked after dentry revalidation
Leandro Awa writes:
"After switching to version 4.1.6, our parallelized and distributed
workflows now fail consistently with errors of the form:
T34: ./regex.c:39:22: error: config.h: No such file or directory
From our 'git bisect' testing, the following commit appears to be the
possible cause of the behavior we've been seeing: commit
766c4cbfacd8"
Al Viro says:
"What happens is that
766c4cbfacd8 got the things subtly wrong.
We used to treat d_is_negative() after lookup_fast() as "fall with
ENOENT". That was wrong - checking ->d_flags outside of ->d_seq
protection is unreliable and failing with hard error on what should've
fallen back to non-RCU pathname resolution is a bug.
Unfortunately, we'd pulled the test too far up and ran afoul of
another kind of staleness. The dentry might have been absolutely
stable from the RCU point of view (and we might be on UP, etc), but
stale from the remote fs point of view. If ->d_revalidate() returns
"it's actually stale", dentry gets thrown away and the original code
wouldn't even have looked at its ->d_flags.
What we need is to check ->d_flags where
766c4cbfacd8 does (prior to
->d_seq validation) but only use the result in cases where we do not
discard this dentry outright"
Reported-by: Leandro Awa <lawa@nvidia.com>
Link: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104911
Fixes: 766c4cbfacd8 ("namei: d_is_negative() should be checked...")
Tested-by: Leandro Awa <lawa@nvidia.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v4.1+
Signed-off-by: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@primarydata.com>
Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>