<4> post_create: setxatter failed
Russell Coker
russell at coker.com.au
Thu May 26 04:09:58 UTC 2005
On Thursday 26 May 2005 02:05, Hans Reiser <reiser at namesys.com> wrote:
> > Finally, are there still known situations where a corrupt ReiserFS file
> >
> >
> >They were reported years ago on the ReiserFS list. Hans didn't seem
> > inclined to fix them as fixing such bugs incurred a performance penalty.
> >
> >If that policy has changed in the ReiserFS development team then I'll
> > write some scripts to randomly corrupt ReiserFS file systems and try to
> > reproduce kernel bugs.
>
> I don't know which bugs you are referring to, and I don't remember
> saying what you ascribe to me. Perhaps you refer to my not fscking each
> node after it is read into memory before it is used by the filesystem.
> I don't think anybody does that, not just us. Some checks are made by
> us, but a complete and exhaustive check is not made by anyone that I
> know of. We could probably write a node plugin that would crc check
> after the node is read from disk. That would be reasonable, and I would
> accept a node plugin to do that.
I don't know the exact cause of the bug in terms of which part of the code was
responsible.
I reported a bug where I had a file system which if mounted would have a
"find /" operation cause a kernel Oops. As far as I am aware the bug in
question was never fixed.
It is my belief and the belief of many other people that a corrupted file
system should not be able to corrupt kernel memory, not even if the file
system is maliciously generated (think about the case of an attacker
inserting a CD or USB disk). I am not aware of any other Linux file system
for which a corrupted partition can cause kernel memory corruption (please
inform me if you know of one).
As for the "complete and exhaustive check", maybe this is an advantage for a
file system based on Inode tables as the data structures are simpler and
easier to check?
--
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