Re: [RFC] simple_recursive_removal()

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 10:24:22PM +0000, Al Viro wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 15, 2019 at 10:10:37PM +0000, Al Viro wrote:
> 
> > I'll probably throw that into #next.dcache - if nothing else,
> > that cuts down on the size of patch converting d_subdirs/d_child
> > from list to hlist...
> > 
> > Need to get some sleep first, though - only 5 hours today, so
> > I want to take another look at that thing tomorrow morning -
> > I don't trust my ability to spot obvious bugs right now... ;-/
> > 
> > Oh, well - that at least might finally push the old "kernel-side
> > rm -rf done right" pile of half-baked patches into more useful
> > state, probably superseding most of them.
> 
> 	Curious...  Is there any point keeping debugfs_remove() and
> debugfs_remove_recursive() separate?   The thing is, the only case
> when their behaviours differ is when the victim is non-empty.  In that
> case the former quietly does nothing; the latter (also quietly) removes
> the entire subtree.  And the caller has no way to tell if that case has
> happened - they can't even look at the dentry they'd passed, since
> in the normal case it's already pointing to freed (and possibly reused)
> memory by that point.
> 
> 	The same goes for tracefs, except that there we have only
> one caller of tracefs_remove(), and it's guaranteed to be a non-directory.
> So there we definitely can fold them together.
> 
> 	Greg, could we declare debufs_remove() to be an alias for
> debugfs_remove_recursive()?

Yes, we can do that there's no reason to keep those separate at all.
Especially if it makes things easier overall.

thanks,

greg k-h