Re: [PATCH 5.15 000/251] 5.15.47-rc2 review

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2022 at 11:20 AM Thomas Backlund <tmb@tmb.nu> wrote:
>
> I "think" this is the suggested fix:
>
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jack/linux-fs.git/commit/?h=for_next&id=46b6418e26c7c26f98ff9c2c2310bce5ae2aa4dd

Ugh, this is just too ugly for words.

That's not a fix. That's a "hide the problem" patch.

Now, admittedly clearly the "hide the problem" code already existed,
and was just moved earlier, but I really think this whole "we're
calling __mark_inode_dirty() on an inode that isn't even *initialized*
yet" is a much deeper issue, and shouldn't have some hacky work-around
in __mark_inode_dirty() that just happens to make it work.

I don't mind that patch per se - moving the code is fine.

But I *do* mind the patch when the reason is to hide that wrong
ordering of operations.

Now, maybe a proper fix might be to say that new_inode_pseudo() should
always initialize i_state to I_DIRTY_ALL or something like that. The
comment already says that they cannot participate in writeback, so
maybe they should be disabled that way (ie a pseudo inode is always
dirty and marking it dirty does nothing).

And then you get rid of the noop_backing_dev_info entirely.

Or just make sure that noop_backing_dev_info is fully initialized
before it's used.

Because I think the real problem here is that things have a pointer to
an uninitialized backing_dev_info.

Hmm? Jan?

                   Linus