Re: Eureka! (was Re: UTF-8 and case-insensitivity)

Linus Torvalds
2004-02-19T21:37:20Z

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> No no. Look at how this works:
> - only one dentry actually exists.

That was really badly phrased. There can be _millions_ of these things,
but they are all "unique" - they have zero impact on each other, and have
no linkages. They never shadow any existing dentries (ie when we create
these, we'd obviously never create a tentative dentry with the same name
as an existing _valid_ dentry), and they are never visible to the
filesystem.

So it's not that "only one dentry" exists, but that that this tentative
dentry only exists as a unique marker of "a dentry of this name _may_
exist".

Linus