On Saturday 03 February 2007 20:16, Jörn Engel wrote: > On its own, I don't like this patch too much. It is just a form of > mental masturbation that complicates the source. Thanks for pointing out the masturbation thing. I was actually polling for comments; this single patch in itself wasn't meant to be the ultimate hot stuff. > > - inode = nd.dentry->d_inode; > > + inode = nd.path.dentry->d_inode; > > However, once we start passing struct path by reference, it should > result in a smaller binary. There are several components to it. Storing the dentry and vfsmount in a struct path allows to pass them somewhere where a struct path is expected without having to construct a temporary struct path object. Also, two parameters would become one; I believe that this could lead to somewhat cleaner code in some places. The other question is whether we would want to pass such struct paths by value or by reference: by value would lead to roughly the same code that we have right now. By reference would reduce the function call overhead, but would blow up the code that accesses the struct path elements by about the same amount: getting to the dentry or vfsmount from a struct path pointer requires a pointer dereference. It's hard to tell whether the code size would decrease overall with by-reference passing. The experiments I did didn't, but I also didn't try to optimize the by-reference code. Thanks, Andreas - 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
