[PATCH] Bug in error recovery in fs/buffer.c::__block_prepare_write()
fs/buffer.c::__block_prepare_write() has broken error recovery. It calls the get_block() callback with "create = 1" and if that succeeds it immediately clears buffer_new on the just allocated buffer (which has buffer_new set). The bug is that if an error occurs and get_block() returns != 0, we break from this loop and go into recovery code. This code has this comment: /* Error case: */ /* * Zero out any newly allocated blocks to avoid exposing stale * data. If BH_New is set, we know that the block was newly * allocated in the above loop. */ So the intent is obviously good in that it wants to clear just allocated and hence not zeroed buffers. However the code recognises allocated buffers by checking for buffer_new being set. Unfortunately __block_prepare_write() as discussed above already cleared buffer_new on all allocated buffers thus no buffers will be cleared during error recovery and old data will be leaked. The simplest way I can see to fix this is to make the current recovery code work by _not_ clearing buffer_new after calling get_block() in __block_prepare_write(). We cannot safely allow buffer_new buffers to "leak out" of __block_prepare_write(), thus we simply do a quick loop over the buffers clearing buffer_new on each of them if it is set just before returning "success" from __block_prepare_write(). Signed-off-by: Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cantab.net> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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