• Josef 'Jeff' Sipek's avatar
    fs: introduce vfs_path_lookup · 16f18200
    Josef 'Jeff' Sipek authored
    Stackable file systems, among others, frequently need to lookup paths or
    path components starting from an arbitrary point in the namespace
    (identified by a dentry and a vfsmount).  Currently, such file systems use
    lookup_one_len, which is frowned upon [1] as it does not pass the lookup
    intent along; not passing a lookup intent, for example, can trigger BUG_ON's
    when stacking on top of NFSv4.
    
    The first patch introduces a new lookup function to allow lookup starting
    from an arbitrary point in the namespace.  This approach has been suggested
    by Christoph Hellwig [2].
    
    The second patch changes sunrpc to use vfs_path_lookup.
    
    The third patch changes nfsctl.c to use vfs_path_lookup.
    
    The fourth patch marks link_path_walk static.
    
    The fifth, and last patch, unexports path_walk because it is no longer
    unnecessary to call it directly, and using the new vfs_path_lookup is
    cleaner.
    
    For example, the following snippet of code, looks up "some/path/component"
    in a directory pointed to by parent_{dentry,vfsmnt}:
    
    err = vfs_path_lookup(parent_dentry, parent_vfsmnt,
    		      "some/path/component", 0, &nd);
    if (!err) {
    	/* exits */
    
    	...
    
    	/* once done, release the references */
    	path_release(&nd);
    } else if (err == -ENOENT) {
    	/* doesn't exist */
    } else {
    	/* other error */
    }
    
    VFS functions such as lookup_create can be used on the nameidata structure
    to pass the create intent to the file system.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJosef 'Jeff' Sipek <jsipek@cs.sunysb.edu>
    Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
    Acked-by: default avatarChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
    Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
    Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
    Cc: Michael Halcrow <mhalcrow@us.ibm.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    16f18200
namei.c 68.7 KB