Hi Al,

When a follow_link dentry call is made, the implementation expects the 
dentry to be followed as well as a nameidata struct to be filled in. 
The received nd->mnt is expected to contain the vfsmount of the dentry 
being followed, so that a subsequent call to vfs_follow_link may 
properly pivot off that mount and onto another vfsmount as the path of 
the link is walked, thus keeping reference counts proper.

The changes made in fs/namei.c@1.42 break this behaviour iff the dentry 
being follow_link'ed is a root dentry.  This is because follow_mount 
follows down next.mnt and not nd->mnt like it used to.  So, if a root 
dentry has a follow_link op, the nd->mnt it receives is in fact the 
vfsmount of the mount it is mounted upon (which breaks reference counts).

Please apply the attached patch which was made against 2.5.72.

Thanks,

Mike Waychison