that we will only call d_compare on dentries that are still active. The actual oops this caused didn't look like a NULL pointer dereference because procfs did a 'container_of(inode, struct proc_inode, vfs_inode)' to get at its internal proc_inode information from the inode pointer, and accessed a field below the inode. So the oops would look something like BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at fffffffffffffff0 IP: [] proc_sys_compare+0x36/0x50 and was seen on both x86-64 (Alexey Dobriyan and Hugh Dickins) and ppc64 (Hugh Dickins). Reported-by: Alexey Dobriyan Acked-by: Hugh Dickins Cc: Al Viro Reviewed-by: "Eric W. Biederman" Signed-of-by: Linus Torvalds ¤,"˜“$x