From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Neil Brown Subject: Re: [PATCH -V18 04/13] vfs: Allow handle based open on symlinks Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:53:03 +1000 Message-ID: <20100820195303.20b17210@notabene> References: <1282269097-26166-1-git-send-email-aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <1282269097-26166-5-git-send-email-aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <20100820083057.GA10039@infradead.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: "Aneesh Kumar K.V" , viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk, adilger@sun.com, corbet@lwn.net, npiggin@suse.de, hooanon05@yahoo.co.jp, bfields@fieldses.org, miklos@szeredi.hu, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, sfrench@us.ibm.com, philippe.deniel@CEA.FR, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org To: Christoph Hellwig Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20100820083057.GA10039@infradead.org> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:30:57 -0400 Christoph Hellwig wrote: > Suddenly getting an file pointer for a symlink which could never happen > before is a really bad idea. Just add a proper readlink_by_handle > system call, similar to what's done in the XFS interface. Why is that? With futexes we suddenly get a file descriptor for something we could never get a file descriptor on before and that doesn't seem to be a problem. Why should symlinks be special as the only thing that you cannot have a file descriptor for? Uniformity of interface is a very valuable property. NeilBrown