Re: [PATCH 15/17] initramfs: switch initramfs unpacking to struct file based APIs

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 8:18 AM Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
> There is no good reason to mess with file descriptors from in-kernel
> code, switch the initramfs unpacking to struct file based write
> instead.  As we don't have nice helper for chmod or chown on a struct
> file or struct path use the pathname based ones instead there.  This
> causes additional (cached) lookups, but keeps the code much simpler.

This is the only one I'm not a huge fan of.

I agree about moving to 'struct file'. But then you could just do the
chown/chmod using chown/chmod_common() on file->f_path.

That would keep the same semantics, and it feels like a more
straightforward patch.

It would still remove the nasty ksys_fchmod/fchmod, it would just
require our - already existing - *_common() functions to be non-static
(and maybe renamed to "vfs_chown/chmod()" instead, that "*_common()"
naming looks a bit odd compared to all our other "vfs_operation()"
helpers).

               Linus