Patch "ext4: make fsync to sync parent dir in no-journal for real this time" has been added to the 3.19-stable tree

This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled

ext4: make fsync to sync parent dir in no-journal for real this time

to the 3.19-stable tree which can be found at:
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary

The filename of the patch is:
ext4-make-fsync-to-sync-parent-dir-in-no-journal-for-real-this-time.patch
and it can be found in the queue-3.19 subdirectory.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <[email protected]> know about it.

From: Lukas Czerner <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2015 10:46:58 -0400
Subject: ext4: make fsync to sync parent dir in no-journal for real this time

From: Lukas Czerner <[email protected]>

commit e12fb97222fc41e8442896934f76d39ef99b590a upstream.

Previously commit 14ece1028b3ed53ffec1b1213ffc6acaf79ad77c added a support for for syncing parent directory of newly created inodes to make sure that the inode is not lost after a power failure in no-journal mode.

However this does not work in majority of cases, namely:
- if the directory has inline data
- if the directory is already indexed
- if the directory already has at least one block and:
- the new entry fits into it
- or we've successfully converted it to indexed

So in those cases we might lose the inode entirely even after fsync in the no-journal mode. This also includes ext2 default mode obviously.

I've noticed this while running xfstest generic/321 and even though the test should fail (we need to run fsck after a crash in no-journal mode) I could not find a newly created entries even when if it was fsynced before.

Fix this by adjusting the ext4_add_entry() successful exit paths to set the inode EXT4_STATE_NEWENTRY so that fsync has the chance to fsync the parent directory as well.

---
 fs/ext4/namei.c |   20 +++++++++++---------
 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)

@@ -1865,7 +1865,7 @@ static int ext4_add_entry(handle_t *hand
 			  struct inode *inode)
 {
 	struct inode *dir = dentry->d_parent->d_inode;
-	struct buffer_head *bh;
+	struct buffer_head *bh = NULL;
 	struct ext4_dir_entry_2 *de;
 	struct ext4_dir_entry_tail *t;
 	struct super_block *sb;

@@ -1889,14 +1889,14 @@ static int ext4_add_entry(handle_t *hand
 			return retval;
 		if (retval == 1) {
 			retval = 0;
-			return retval;
+			goto out;
 		}
 	}
 
 	if (is_dx(dir)) {
 		retval = ext4_dx_add_entry(handle, dentry, inode);
 		if (!retval || (retval != ERR_BAD_DX_DIR))
-			return retval;
+			goto out;
 		ext4_clear_inode_flag(dir, EXT4_INODE_INDEX);
 		dx_fallback++;
 		ext4_mark_inode_dirty(handle, dir);

@@ -1908,14 +1908,15 @@ static int ext4_add_entry(handle_t *hand
 			return PTR_ERR(bh);
 
 		retval = add_dirent_to_buf(handle, dentry, inode, NULL, bh);
-		if (retval != -ENOSPC) {
-			brelse(bh);
-			return retval;
-		}
+		if (retval != -ENOSPC)
+			goto out;
 
 		if (blocks == 1 && !dx_fallback &&
-		    EXT4_HAS_COMPAT_FEATURE(sb, EXT4_FEATURE_COMPAT_DIR_INDEX))
-			return make_indexed_dir(handle, dentry, inode, bh);
+		    EXT4_HAS_COMPAT_FEATURE(sb, EXT4_FEATURE_COMPAT_DIR_INDEX)) {
+			retval = make_indexed_dir(handle, dentry, inode, bh);
+			bh = NULL; /* make_indexed_dir releases bh */
+			goto out;
+		}
 		brelse(bh);
 	}
 	bh = ext4_append(handle, dir, &block);

@@ -1931,6 +1932,7 @@ static int ext4_add_entry(handle_t *hand
 	}
 
 	retval = add_dirent_to_buf(handle, dentry, inode, de, bh);
+out:
 	brelse(bh);
 	if (retval == 0)
 		ext4_set_inode_state(inode, EXT4_STATE_NEWENTRY);

Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from [email protected] are

queue-3.19/ext4-make-fsync-to-sync-parent-dir-in-no-journal-for-real-this-time.patch