From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S965711AbXCGWSI (ORCPT ); Wed, 7 Mar 2007 17:18:08 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S965700AbXCGWSI (ORCPT ); Wed, 7 Mar 2007 17:18:08 -0500 Received: from verein.lst.de ([213.95.11.210]:38118 "EHLO mail.lst.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S965707AbXCGWSF (ORCPT ); Wed, 7 Mar 2007 17:18:05 -0500 Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 23:17:46 +0100 From: Christoph Hellwig To: Steven French Cc: Christoph Hellwig , linux-cifs-client@lists.samba.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] cifs: remove useless cargo-cult checks Message-ID: <20070307221746.GA3620@lst.de> References: <20070307152912.GA15650@lst.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.28i X-Spam-Score: 0 () Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 12:51:04PM -0600, Steven French wrote: > > file->f_path.dentry or file->f_path.dentry.d_inode can't be NULL > > OK - I don't really mind removing these checks - and I agree that I there > is not an obvious way that they can be null, yet we had a case in which > file->f_dentry was reported as NULL a few years back in a bug report that > we could not reproduce. There's a good reason you couldn't reproduce it, because it most likely must have been a really bad hack in the submitters kernel. Setting up file->f_dentry is one of the first thing we do after allocating the file struct. > > The change to f_path.dentry did hit all filesystems (not sure who did it > last year) and that patch did hit lkml - so this is not something new that > just slipped in. I know - that patch just made the enormous amount of useless checks vissible. > Is there an easy way to mirror particular patches going into the > cifs-2.6.git tree (which is pulled into mm) to lkml? Maybe some git expert can comment on that. > The cifs patches go in mm for at least a week before they go into kernel > but some of them I would like to post again to lkml. polling -mm is a little hard as it's an enormous blob, so posting to lkml or -fsdevel would definitively be quite helpfull.