problem with duplicate sysfs directories and files

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

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?

thanks,

greg k-h