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  • Theodore Ts'o's avatar
    ext4: avoid reusing recently deleted inodes in no journal mode · 19883bd9
    Theodore Ts'o authored
    
    
    In no journal mode, if an inode has recently been deleted, we
    shouldn't reuse it right away.  Otherwise it's possible, after an
    unclean shutdown, to hit a situation where a recently deleted inode
    gets reused for some other purpose before the inode table block has
    been written to disk.  However, if the directory entry has been
    updated, then the directory entry will be pointing at the old inode
    contents.
    
    E2fsck will make sure the file system is consistent after the
    unclean shutdown.  However, if the recently deleted inode is a
    character mode device, or an inode with the immutable bit set, even
    after the file system has been fixed up by e2fsck, it can be
    possible for a *.pyc file to be pointing at a character mode
    device, and when python tries to open the *.pyc file, Hilarity
    Ensues.  We could change all of userspace to be very suspicious
    about stat'ing files before opening them, and clearing the
    immutable flag if necessary --- or we can just avoid reusing an
    inode number if it has been recently deleted.
    
    Google-Bug-Id: 10017573
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatar"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
    19883bd9