hat caller already has to do the sequence number check for the parent anyway, so just do that. That allows us to stop returning the dentry->d_inode in that in-out argument (pointer-to-pointer-to-inode), so we can make the inode argument just a regular input inode pointer. The caller can just load the inode from dentry->d_inode, and then do the sequence number check after that to make sure that it's synchronized with the name we looked up. And it allows us to just pass in the dentry to dentry_cmp(), which is what all the callers really wanted. Sure, dentry_cmp() has to be a bit careful about the dentry (which is not stable during RCU lookup), but that's actually very simple. And now that dentry_cmp() can clearly see that the first string argument is a dentry, we can use the direct word access for that, instead of the careful unaligned zero-padding. The dentry name is always properly aligned, since it is a single path component that is either embedded into the dentry itself, or was allocated with kmalloc() (see __d_alloc). Finally, this also uninlines the nasty slow-case for dentry comparisons: that one *does* need to do a sequence number check, since it will call in to the low-level filesystems, and we want to give those a stable inode pointer and path component length/start arguments. Doing an extra sequence check for that slow case is not a problem, though. Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds I5Í|›?x