Re: [syzbot] WARNING in mntput_no_expire (2)

[Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2021 at 02:35:05PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:

> And while we're at it might I bring up the possibility of an additional
> cleanup of how we currently call path_init().
> Right now we pass the return value from path_init() directly into e.g.
> link_path_walk() which as a first thing checks for error. Which feels
> rather wrong and has always confused me when looking at these codepaths.

Why?

> I get that it might make sense for reasons unrelated to path_init() that
> link_path_walk() checks its first argument for error but path_init()
> should be checked for error right away especially now that we return
> early when LOOKUP_CACHED is set without LOOKUP_RCU.

But you are making the _callers_ of path_init() do that, for no good
reason.

> thing especially in longer functions such as path_lookupat() where it
> gets convoluted pretty quickly. I think it would be cleaner to have
> something like [1]. The early exists make the code easier to reason
> about imho. But I get that that's a style discussion.

Your variant is a lot more brittle, actually.

> @@ -2424,33 +2424,49 @@ static int path_lookupat(struct nameidata *nd, unsigned flags, struct path *path
>         int err;
> 
>         s = path_init(nd, flags);
> -       if (IS_ERR(s))
> -               return PTR_ERR(s);

Where has that come from, BTW?  Currently path_lookupat() does no such thing.