Re: Carefully crafted BTRFS-image causes kernel to crash

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 07:44:12AM -0400, Austin S Hemmelgarn wrote:

On 2015-04-21 05:38, Russell Coker wrote:

quoted

On Tue, 21 Apr 2015, Qu Wenruo [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Although we may add extra check for such problem to improve robustness,
but IMHO it's not a real world problem.

Some of the ReiserFS developers gave a similar reaction to some of my bug
reports.  ReiserFS wasn't the most robust filesystem.

I think that it should be EXECTED that a kernel will have to occasionally deal
with filesystem images that are created by hostile parties.  Userspace crash
and kernel freeze is not a suitable way of dealing with it.

And that kind of reaction is why ReiserFS isn't taken very seriously in 
an enterprise environment.

Just because something shouldn't be possible in a 'real world' 
environment, doesn't mean it won't happen; never underestimate the 
ability of hardware to fail in new and unexpected ways, or the ability 
of administrators to make stupid mistakes.

I agree, given the high number of random memory bitflips that I've seen
in past years, that were stored to the disk with valid checksums.
Whether it's a real-world or potentially a hw problem IMO adjusts the
priority, but the issues should be fixed if possible.