On Thu, 20 Apr 2006, Al Viro wrote: > On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 01:51:21PM +0100, Anton Altaparmakov wrote: > > > - I don't immediately see a race that taking the lock on the victim of > > > sys_unlink() solves; however, for symmetry with sys_rmdir(), it seems > > > desirable. > > > > I guess the symmetry thing is fair enough. > > Not only; it does, among other things, guarantee that fs can assume that > ->link() won't race with unlink() (and that link count is protected by > ->i_mutex, while we are at it). Ok. > > ntfs_rename() at the moment looks roughly like this: > > > > if (target_inode) { > > if (S_ISDIR(target_inode->i_mode) > > ntfs_rmdir(target_dir_inode, target_dentry); > > else > > ntfs_unlink(target_dir_inode, target_dentry); > > } > > mutex_lock(&old_inode->i_mutex); > > ntfs_link(old_dentry, target_dir_inode, target_dentry); > > ntfs_unlink(old_dir_inode, old_dentry); > > mutex_unlock(&old_inode->i_mutex); > > Have fun dealing with error handling in the above... Note that failing > rename() should _NOT_ lead to target disappearing. Indeed. But if I do not define a rename operation at all then the mv command looses the target if the move fails, too. So I don't see how the native rename needs to be any better other than for standards compliance. Error recovery is actually pretty easy as if the second ntfs_unlink() fails I simply ntfs_unlink() the link I just created with ntfs_link(). That already works fine. But yes at the moment I do lose the target if either the ntfs_link() or the second ntfs_unlink() fails. I am planning to fix this though. It is not too hard because I can more or less just ntfs_link() it back in (with a few special casings). Even if I implement are more "native" rename not using ntfs_unlink()/ntfs_link() I still have to remove the target first otherwise I cannot insert the new target because you cannot have two entries in the B+tree that have identical index keys (the index key is the filename itself so the two would be equal). And I cannot simply replace the B+tree index entry because NTFS is not case sensitive so the two names (old and new) may not be in the same place in the B+tree. The only thing I can do is to remove the old B+tree index entry and add the new one after that fact. So no matter what I do, I have to be able to recreate the old index entry and that is just what ntfs_link() does which is why I chose my "simplified rename" approach in the first place. Thanks a lot for you comments about the locking! Best regards, Anton -- Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @) Unix Support, Computing Service, University of Cambridge, CB2 3QH, UK Linux NTFS maintainer, http://www.linux-ntfs.org/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html