jbd2: gracefully abort on transaction state corruptions

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Auditing the jbd2 codebase reveals several legacy J_ASSERT calls
that enforce internal state machine invariants (e.g., verifying
jh->b_transaction or jh->b_next_transaction pointers).

When these invariants are broken, the journal is in a corrupted
state. However, triggering a fatal panic brings down the entire
system for a localized filesystem error.

This patch targets a specific class of these asserts: those
residing inside functions that natively return integer error codes,
booleans, or error pointers. It replaces the hard J_ASSERTs with
WARN_ON_ONCE to capture the offending stack trace, safely drops
any held locks, gracefully aborts the journal, and returns -EINVAL.

This prevents a catastrophic kernel panic while ensuring the
corrupted journal state is safely contained and upstream callers
(like ext4 or ocfs2) can gracefully handle the aborted handle.

Functions modified in fs/jbd2/transaction.c:
- jbd2__journal_start()
- do_get_write_access()
- jbd2_journal_dirty_metadata()
- jbd2_journal_forget()
- jbd2_journal_try_to_free_buffers()
- jbd2_journal_file_inode()

Signed-off-by: Milos Nikic <nikic.milos@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Zhang Yi <yi.zhang@huawei.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Andreas Dilger <adilger@dilger.ca>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260304172016.23525-3-nikic.milos@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>

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This commit is contained in:

Milos Nikic 2026-03-04 09:20:16 -08:00 • committed by Theodore Ts'o

parent 64924362f8

commit f7fc28b014

1 changed files with 86 additions and 28 deletions

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fs/jbd2/transaction.c

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