tree 0c5ae76ac2674227f76410b2fe8a66dea803921f
parent aef5cdd36930160b18e71d2c51f84a885d990760
author Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org> 1678845342 -0700
committer Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org> 1680480814 -0700

misc: test the dir/attr hash before formatting or repairing fs

Back in the 6.2-rc1 days, Eric Whitney reported a fstests regression in
ext4 against generic/454.  The cause of this test failure was the
unfortunate combination of setting an xattr name containing UTF8 encoded
emoji, an xattr hash function that accepted a char pointer with no
explicit signedness, signed type extension of those chars to an int, and
the 6.2 build tools maintainers deciding to mandate -funsigned-char
across the board.  As a result, the ondisk extended attribute structure
written out by 6.1 and 6.2 were not the same.

This discrepancy, in fact, had been noticeable if a filesystem with such
an xattr were moved between any two architectures that don't employ the
same signedness of a raw "char" declaration.  The only reason anyone
noticed is that x86 gcc defaults to signed, and no such -funsigned-char
update was made to e2fsprogs, so e2fsck immediately started reporting
data corruption.

After a day and a half of discussing how to handle this use case (xattrs
with bit 7 set anywhere in the name) without breaking existing users,
Linus merged his own patch and didn't tell the mailing list.  None of
the developers noticed until AUTOSEL made an announcement.

In the end, this problem could have been detected much earlier if there
had been any useful tests of hash function(s) in use inside ext4 to make
sure that they always produce the same outputs given the same inputs.

The XFS dirent/xattr name hash takes a uint8_t*, so I don't think it's
vulnerable to this problem.  However, let's avoid all this drama by
adding our own self test to check that the da hash produces the same
outputs for a static pile of inputs on various platforms.  This
corresponds to the similar patch for the kernel.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-ext4/Y8bpkm3jA3bDm3eL@debian-BULLSEYE-live-builder-AMD64/
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>