A negative cookie pointer merely suppresses caching at that level. The stub in linux/fscache.h will detect inline the negative cookie pointer and abort the operation as fast as possible. This means that the compiler doesn't have to set up for a call in that case. See the documentation in Documentation/filesystems/caching/netfs-api.txt for more information. Signed-off-by: David Howells Acked-by: Steve Dickson Acked-by: Trond Myklebust Acked-by: Al Viro Tested-by: Daire Byrne ôX