ext4_iget() returns -ESTALE if invoked on a deleted inode, in order to
report errors to NFS properly. However, in ext4_lookup(), this
-ESTALE can be propagated to userspace if the filesystem is corrupted
such that a directory entry references a deleted inode. This leads to
a misleading error message - "Stale NFS file handle" - and confusion
on the part of the admin.
The bug can be easily reproduced by creating a new filesystem, making
a link to an unused inode using debugfs, then mounting and attempting
to ls -l said link.
This patch thus changes ext4_lookup to return -EIO if it receives
-ESTALE from ext4_iget(), as ext4 does for other filesystem metadata
corruption; and also invokes the appropriate ext*_error functions when
this case is detected.
Signed-off-by: Bryan Donlan <bdonlan@gmail.com>
Cc: <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
e6f009b0b4