For a long time now I have had a problem with not being able to return a
lookup failure on an existsing directory.  In autofs this corresponds to a
mount failure on a autofs managed mount entry that is browsable (and so the
mount point directory exists).

While this problem has been present for a long time I've avoided resolving
it because it was not very visible.  But now that autofs v5 has "mount and
expire on demand" of nested multiple mounts, such as is found when mounting
an export list from a server, solving the problem cannot be avoided any
longer.

I've tried very hard to find a way to do this entirely within the autofs4
module but have not been able to find a satisfactory way to achieve it.

So, I need to propose a change to the VFS.
Signed-off-by: Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>