Re: [PATCH 1/2] vfs: make real_lookup do dentry revalidation with

[Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net>]

Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 10:34:12AM +0800, Ian Kent wrote:
>> Some time ago Christoph suggested registering both autofs and autofs4
>> but I'm not sure about that since both modules have always only
>> registered autofs as the file system name.
> 
> Oops, I didn't notice that.
> 
>> We can add a MODULE_ALIAS() to the module source but that doesn't
>> completely work, I think because the user space tools then don't get the
>> directory right. Changing the user space configuration is also
>> problematic because booting from a kernel with and without would require
>> a configuration change every time.
>>
>> The obvious simple solution would be to use symlinks to make the
>> directory and module appear to be present, set about a process of user
>> awareness and remove them after some pre-defined number of subsequent
>> releases but I'm not sure how that approach would be received? We could
>> even write a module stub that issues a warning message to syslog and
>> then loads the autofs module but I haven't tried that yet.
>>
>> Please, folks, some suggestions.
> 
> Just build two modules using the same source code?  That quite ugly, but
> if the userspace is really that messed up I can't think of any better
> idea.

Yep, that's what I've ended up doing for now, (after the autofs4 source
has been copied) autofs4 will build from autofs source, along with a
Kconfig help message explaining autofs4 is going to be removed.

Ian