Re: [f2fs-dev] [PATCH v6 0/9] Support negative dentries on case-insensitive ext4 and f2fs

Linus Torvalds
2023-11-23T00:19:17Z

On Wed, 22 Nov 2023 at 13:19, Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> wrote:
>
> The serious gap, AFAICS, is the interplay with open-by-fhandle.

So I'm obviously not a fan of igncase filesystems, but I don't think
this series actually changes any of that.

> It's not unfixable, but we need to figure out what to do when
> lookup runs into a disconnected directory alias. d_splice_alias()
> will move it in place, all right, but any state ->lookup() has
> hung off the dentry that had been passed to it will be lost.

I guess this migth be about the new DCACHE_CASEFOLDED_NAME bit.

At least for now, that is only used by generic_ci_d_revalidate() for
negative dentries, so it shouldn't matter for that d_splice_alias()
that only does positive dentries. No?

Or is there something else you worry about?

Side note: Gabriel, as things are now, instead of that

if (!d_is_casefolded_name(dentry))
return 0;

in generic_ci_d_revalidate(), I would suggest that any time a
directory is turned into a case-folded one, you'd just walk all the
dentries for that directory and invalidate negative ones at that
point. Or was there some reason I missed that made it a good idea to
do it at run-time after-the-fact?

Linus