linux-ext4 - Re: [PATCH] ext3: Avoid false EIO errors

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Date:	Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:15:23 +0530
From:	"Aneesh Kumar K.V" <aneesh.kumar@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
To:	Eric Sandeen <sandeen@...hat.com>
Cc:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] ext3: Avoid false EIO errors

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 08:53:42AM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> Aneesh Kumar K.V wrote:
> 
> > We do a vmtruncate if we failed to allocate blocks in
> > ext3_write_begin. That is done after the closing the current
> > transaction. If we crash in between (ie, after committing the
> > transaction allocating blocks and before committing the transaction that
> > is doing truncate) we would only have  some data blocks leaking. But
> > that would be better than user seeing zero's in the file ?. Also if we
> > happen to add the inode to the orphan list and crash, the recovery would
> > truncate it properly. So by doing a vmtruncate I guess the window would be
> > small and we are already doing that in ext3_write_begin.
> 
> I don't agree that leaking data blocks is better than exposing zeros...
> the former is a security flaw, the latter a (significant) annoyance.
> 

Even when we fail to track few data blocks we do zero them using 
page_zero_new_buffers. So it should not imply a security flaw. I guess
if we crash failing to commit the truncate fsck will look at the bitmap
and find the blocks which are not tracked by any inode and will mark them
free.

-aneesh
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