Eric Biggers <ebiggers@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > I notice that the existing vfat_revalidate_ci() in fs/fat/namei_vfat.c behaves > differently in the 'flags == 0' case: > > > /* > * This may be nfsd (or something), anyway, we can't see the > * intent of this. So, since this can be for creation, drop it. > */ > if (!flags) > return 0; > > I don't know whether that's really needed, but have you thought about this? Hi Eric, I didn't look much into it before because, as you know, the vfat case-insensitive implementation is completely different than the ext4/f2fs code. But I think you are on to something. The original intent of this check was to safeguard against the case where d_revalidate would be called without nameidata from the filesystem helpers. The filesystems don't give the purpose of the lookup (nd->flags) so there is no way to tell if the dentry is being used for creation, and therefore we can't rely on the negative dentry for ci. The path is like this: lookup_one_len(...) __lookup_hash(..., nd = NULL) cached_lookup(...) do_revalidate(parent, name, nd) dentry->d_op->d_revalidate(parent, nd); Then !nd was dropped to pass flags directly around 2012, which overloaded the flags meaning. Which means, d_revalidate can still be called for creation without (LOOKUP_CREATE|...). For instance, in nfsd_create. I wasn't considering this. This sucks, because we don't have enough information to avoid the name check in this case, so we'd also need memcmp there. Except it won't be safe. because callers won't necessarily hold the parent lock in the path below. lookup_one_unlocked() lookup_dcache() d_revalidate() // called unlocked Thus, I'll have to add a similar: if (!flags) return 0; Ahead of the is_creation check. It will solve it. But i think the issue is in VFS. the lookup_one_* functions should have proper lookup flags, such that d_revalidate can tell the purpose of the lookup. -- Gabriel Krisman Bertazi