The image present at
http://kernelfun.blogspot.com/2006/11/mokb-09-11-2006-linux-26x-ext2checkpage.html
contains a root directory which has a corrupt i_size, which is extremely large.

This causes 

ext2_lookup
	ext2_inode_by_name
		ext2_find_entry

to go off and try to check every page <= i_size (via ext2_check_page()), and of
course each one fails, but there is a huge number to check.  These failures
cause a storm of printk's which could in theory result in a DoS, esp. if you
have only one cpu to work with.

A quick fix for this corruption case would be to simply check the directory size
vs. block count; ext2 directories cannot be sparse so if this fails, we can
abort the operation early:

--- linux-2.6.18.orig/fs/ext2/namei.c
+++ linux-2.6.18/fs/ext2/namei.c
@@ -60,6 +60,12 @@ static struct dentry *ext2_lookup(struct
        if (dentry->d_name.len > EXT2_NAME_LEN)
                return ERR_PTR(-ENAMETOOLONG);
 
+       if (dir->i_size > dir->i_blocks << 9) {
+               printk("corrupted dir #%lu (sparse) len %llu blocks %llu\n",
+                       dir->i_ino, dir->i_size, dir->i_blocks);
+               return ERR_PTR(-EIO);
+       }
+
        ino = ext2_inode_by_name(dir, dentry);
        inode = NULL;
        if (ino) {

This results in an error such as:

EXT2-fs error (device loop0): ext2_readdir: bad page in #2
corrupted dir #2 (sparse) len 3238004736 blocks 4

when we try to look up files in the directory:

[root@bear-04 ~]# cat mnt/*
cat: mnt/*: Input/output error

If the corruption were more intentional, and a very large i_size and i_blocks
correlate, then additional checking might be needed to address this; perhaps
something like keeping a count of the number of bad pages found, and aborting
the operation if it exceeds a threshold...

Alternately, I notice that ext2_readdir aborts on the first bad page it finds,
while ext2_lookup tries to soldier on, page after page.  Seems like maybe these
should be consistent; if so just bailing on the first bad page we find would
catch all cases.

I'll bring this up on the ext4 list.