We need to get the underlying dentry of parent; sure, absent the races
it is the parent of underlying dentry, but there's nothing to prevent
losing a timeslice to preemtion in the middle of evaluation of
lower_dentry->d_parent->d_inode, having another process move lower_dentry
around and have its (ex)parent not pinned anymore and freed on memory
pressure. Then we regain CPU and try to fetch ->d_inode from memory
that is freed by that point.
dentry->d_parent *is* stable here - it's an argument of ->lookup() and
we are guaranteed that it won't be moved anywhere until we feed it
to d_add/d_splice_alias. So we safely go that way to get to its
underlying dentry.
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # since 2009 or so
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
762c69685f