Re: [git pull] fixes for 3.12-final

Linus Torvalds
2013-11-03T23:39:18Z

On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 11:54 AM, Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> wrote:
>
> IIRC, at some point such an attempt has seriously hurt iget() on 32bit
> boxen, so we ended up deciding not to go there. Had been years ago,
> though...

Yeah, I think the circumstances have changed. 32-bit is less
important, and iget() is much less critical than it used to be (all
*normal* inode lookups are through the direct dentry pointer).

Sure, ARM is a few years away from 64-bit being common, but it's
happening. And I suspect even 32-bit ARM doesn't have the annoying
issues that x86-32 had with 64-bit values (namely using up a lot of
the register space).

So unless there's something hidden that makes it really nasty, I do
suspect that a "u64 i_ino" would just be the right thing to do. Rather
than adding workarounds for our current odd situation on 32-bit
kernels (and just wasting time on 64-bit kernels).

Linus