her any of its members have changed. * Dentry lookups (based on parent, candidate string tuple) recheck the parent sequence after the child is found in case anything changed in the parent during the path walk. * inode is also RCU protected so we can load d_inode and use the inode for limited things. * i_mode, i_uid, i_gid can be tested for exec permissions during path walk. * i_op can be loaded. When we reach the destination dentry, we lock it, recheck lookup sequence, and increment its refcount and mountpoint refcount. RCU and vfsmount locks are dropped. This is termed "dropping rcu-walk". If the dentry refcount does not match, we can not drop rcu-walk gracefully at the current point in the lokup, so instead return -ECHILD (for want of a better errno). This signals the path walking code to re-do the entire lookup with a ref-walk. Aside from the final dentry, there are other situations that may be encounted where we cannot continue rcu-walk. In that case, we drop rcu-walk (ie. take a reference on the last good dentry) and continue with a ref-walk. Again, if we can drop rcu-walk gracefully, we return -ECHILD and do the whole lookup using ref-walk. But it is very important that we can continue with ref-walk for most cases, particularly to avoid the overhead of double lookups, and to gain the scalability advantages on common path elements (like cwd and root). The cases where rcu-walk cannot continue are: * NULL dentry (ie. any uncached path element) * parent with d_inode->i_op->permission or ACLs * dentries with d_revalidate * Following links In future patches, permission checks and d_revalidate become rcu-walk aware. It may be possible eventually to make following links rcu-walk aware. Uncached path elements will always require dropping to ref-walk mode, at the very least because i_mutex needs to be grabbed, and objects allocated. Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin eÞ¢²ž"x