Re: [RFC PATCH] file as directory

From: Al Viro
Date: Wed May 23 2007 - 03:37:15 EST


On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 09:19:17AM +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > Eh... Arbitrary limitations are fun, aren't they?
>
> But these mounts _are_ special. There is really no point in moving or
> pivoting them.

pivoting - probably true, moving... why not?

> > What about MNT_SLAVE stuff being set up prior to that lookup?
>
> These mounts are not propagated. Or at least I hope so. Propagation
> stuff is a bit too complicated for my poor little brain.

Er... These mounts might not be propagated, but what about a bind
over another instance of such file in master tree?

> I think they should be the same superblock, same dentry. What would
> be the advantage of doing otherwise?

Then you are going to have interesting time with locking in final mntput().
BTW, what about having several links to the same file? You have i_mutex
on the inode, so serialization of those is not a problem, but...

> I think doing this recursively should be allowed. "Releasing last ref
> cleans up the mess" should work in that case.

Releasing the last reference will lead to cascade of umounts in that
case... IOW, need to be careful with locking.
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