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: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
19883bd965