ext3 extended attributes refcounting wrong?

[Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@user.it.uu.se>]

I believe there is some accounting error in the ext3 code
for the case when CONFIG_EXT3_FS_XATTR is not selected.

Whenever any one of my development boxes triggers an fsck
at boot because some file system, usually /, has been mounted
sufficiently many times, an inconsistency error occurs:

Extended attribute block N has reference count M, should be M'.

where M' is much less than M. As I drop into single-user and
run fsck, it finds at lot occurrences of this error, followed by:

Block bitmap differences ...

and then:

Free blocks count wrong

(always too low, i.e. I have more free blocks than the fs records).

This occurs on all my boxes, with different CPUs (x86/x86-64/ppc)
and different chipsets (Intel, Promise, VIA, Apple), and basically
the only commonalities are:
- they dual boot the most recent 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, and I switch often
- all file systems are ext3
- all XATTR stuff is disabled

/Mikael