Re: RFC: permit link(2) to work across --bind mounts ?

From: Mark Lord
Date: Tue Dec 18 2007 - 17:57:36 EST


Mark Lord wrote:
Why does link(2) not support hard-linking across bind mount points
of the same underlying filesystem ?

Is it as simple as something like this patch below (minus the printk)?
Not likely, but then I'm not a filesystem guru.

???

--- old/fs/namei.c 2007-12-15 12:33:13.000000000 -0500
+++ linux/fs/namei.c 2007-12-18 17:37:04.000000000 -0500
@@ -2398,8 +2398,11 @@
if (error)
goto out;
error = -EXDEV;
- if (old_nd.mnt != nd.mnt)
- goto out_release;
+ if (old_nd.mnt != nd.mnt) {
+ if (old_nd.mnt->mnt_sb != nd.mnt->mnt_sb)
+ goto out_release;
+ printk("sys_linkat: old_nd.mnt != nd.mnt, but sb is the same. Continuing..\n");
+ }
new_dentry = lookup_create(&nd, 0);
error = PTR_ERR(new_dentry);
if (IS_ERR(new_dentry))
..

The patch seems to work for me after some light testing on ext3 here.
But I have no idea about other filesystems, or if there's some kind of
race condition or something. Or maybe we just never bothered ?

Cheers
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