From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756705AbYLEStg (ORCPT ); Fri, 5 Dec 2008 13:49:36 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753195AbYLESt2 (ORCPT ); Fri, 5 Dec 2008 13:49:28 -0500 Received: from mx2.redhat.com ([66.187.237.31]:34904 "EHLO mx2.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751439AbYLESt2 (ORCPT ); Fri, 5 Dec 2008 13:49:28 -0500 Organization: Red Hat UK Ltd. Registered Address: Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SI4 1TE, United Kingdom. Registered in England and Wales under Company Registration No. 3798903 From: David Howells In-Reply-To: References: <20081205162318.20732.73054.stgit@warthog.procyon.org.uk> To: Linus Torvalds Cc: dhowells@redhat.com, Andrew Morton , bfields@fieldses.org, hugh@veritas.com, hch@infradead.org, Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: [PATCH] EXPORTFS: Don't return NULL from fh_to_dentry()/fh_to_parent() [ver #4] Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:49:14 +0000 Message-ID: <23235.1228502954@redhat.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Linus Torvalds wrote: > It's not like returning NULL doesn't make sense. Quite frankly, I think it > makes a lot more sense than returning -ESTALE, which is a very unnatural > error for most filesystems. The d_obtain_alias() function will immediately return -ESTALE if given a NULL inode, though, and sometimes it'll return some other error. It would also seem odd to sometimes return NULL to indicate an error, and sometimes return a -ve error code to indicate an error. Perhaps one or the other should be selected for consistency. David