Re: [PATCH -V18 04/13] vfs: Allow handle based open on symlinks

Neil Brown
2010-08-20T09:53:20Z

On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:30:57 -0400
Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> 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