Re: problem with duplicate sysfs directories and files

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> 
> I spent some time tonight trying to track down how to fix the issue of
> duplicate sysfs files and/or directories.  This happens when you try to
> create a kobject with the same name in the same directory.  The creation
> of the second kobject will fail, but the directory will remain in sysfs.
> 
> Now I know this isn't a normal operation, but it would be good to fix
> this eventually.  I traced the issue down to fs/sysfs/dir.c:create_dir()
> and the check for:
> 	if (error && (error != -EEXIST)) {
> 
> Problem is, error is set to -EEXIST, so we don't clean up properly.  Now
> I know we can't just not check for this, as if you do that error
> cleanup, the original kobject's sysfs entry gets very messed up (ls -l
> does not like it at all...)
> 
> But I can't seem to figure out what exactly we need to do to clean up
> properly here.
> 
> Do you, or anyone else, have any pointers or ideas?
> 

Emit a loud warning and don't bother cleaning up - leave the current
behaviour as-is.  Whatever takes the least amount code and has the minimum
end-user impact, IMO.