Re: [PATCH -V16 07/12] vfs: Support null pathname in linkat

From: Aneesh Kumar K. V
Date: Mon Jul 12 2010 - 06:59:28 EST


On Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:05:39 +0200, Miklos Szeredi <miklos@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Jul 2010, Aneesh Kumar K.V wrote:
> > This enables to use linkat to create hardlinks from a
> > file descriptor pointing to the file. This can be used
> > with open_by_handle syscall that returns a file descriptor.
>
> This needs more thought, filesystems don't usually tolerate
> resurrecting a file which has already been unlinked (i_nlink == 0).
>

We get -ENOENT error when we do that on ext*

open("test", O_RDONLY) = 3
unlink("test") = 0
linkat(3, NULL, AT_FDCWD, "test3", 0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

ext4_link does the below

/*
* Return -ENOENT if we've raced with unlink and i_nlink is 0. Doing
* otherwise has the potential to corrupt the orphan inode list.
*/
if (inode->i_nlink == 0)
return -ENOENT;

I can move this check to VFS so that we do it for all file systems.

-aneesh
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