Re: [RFC PATCH v2] fs: touch up symlink clean up in lookup

From: Chris Mason

Date: Thu Dec 18 2025 - 12:11:43 EST


On 12/17/25 6:23 AM, Mateusz Guzik wrote:
> Provide links_cleanup_rcu() and links_cleanup_ref() for rcu- and ref-
> walks respectively.
>
> The somewhat misleading drop_links() gets renamed to links_issue_delayed_calls(),
> which spells out what it is actually doing.
>
> There are no changes in behavior, this however should be less
> error-prone going forward.
>
> Signed-off-by: Mateusz Guzik <mjguzik@xxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> fs/namei.c | 45 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------
> 1 file changed, 32 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)
>
> v2:
> - remove the mindless copy-paste in links_cleanup_ref, instead only move
> path_puts on the symlinks
>
> this performs path_put on nd->path later, which should not be a material
> difference.
>
> this assumes the LOOKUP_CACHED fixup is applied:
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20251217104854.GU1712166@ZenIV/T/#mff14d1dd88729f40fa94ada8beaa64e0c41097ff
>
> technically the 2 patches could be combined, but I did not want to do it
> given the bug
>
> Chris, can you feed this thing into the magic llm? Better yet, is it
> something I can use myself? I passed the known buggy patch to gcc
> -fanalyze and clang --analyze and neither managed to point out any
> issues.
>

Looks like you and Al are still discussing the specifics, but I ran this
version through the review prompts and it didn't find any problems.

With claude or gemini subscriptions, you can run them locally:

https://github.com/masoncl/review-prompts

(Other AI providers may work too, but those are the only two I've heard
about so far)

-chris