Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Alexander G. M. Smith
2004-09-01T11:53:22Z

Hans Reiser wrote on Wed, 01 Sep 2004 00:22:49 -0700:
> Making "hard links only link to the file aspect of the file-directory
> duality, and persons who want to link to the directory aspect must use
> symlinks" seems to solve this. If we want to use the Alexander Smith
> solution to cycle detection, and allow hard links to directories, then
> we must make sure that for the hard linked entity, there is a single
> lock for it somewhere (e.g. the directory inode) that can be taken.

Oddly enough that's what I did in my RAM file system. No matter how
the file/directory node is found (the path can lead through different
parents), it has a unique ID and a corresponding single lock for it.

Rename/delete goes and locks all the nodes that might change parents
and/or children, then it does its operations (though it has to watch
out for deadlocks, which are unavoidable when two rename/deletes both
sneak up on the same file by different paths).

- Alex