Here's a set of patches that remove all calls to iget() and all read_inode() functions. They should be removed for two reasons: firstly they don't lend themselves to good error handling, and secondly their presence is a temptation for code outside a filesystem to call iget() to access inodes within that filesystem. There are a few benefits to this: (1) Error handling gets simpler as you can return an error code rather than having to call is_bad_inode(). (2) You can now tell the difference between ENOMEM and EIO occurring in the read_inode() path. (3) The code should get smaller. iget() is an inline function that is typically called 2-3 times per filesystem that uses it. By folding the iget code into the read_inode code for each filesystem, it eliminates some duplication. A tarball of the patches can be retrieved from: http://people.redhat.com/~dhowells/iget-remove.tar.bz2 Additionally, there are a couple of patches that introduce an ERR_CAST() macro to be used instead of ERR_PTR(PTR_ERR(p)) constructs and apply it to all such instances in the kernel. Of the patches directly relevant to the subject: The first patch adds a function, iget_failed() that is a canned piece of code for killing an inode when the inode construction path fails. The second and third patches makes AFS and GFS2 use iget_failed() rather than interpolating the sequence directly. The final patch removes iget() and read_inode(). Each of the other patches modify a filesystem that used iget() and read_inode() to use iget_locked() instead. The standard procedure was to convert: void thingyfs_read_inode(struct inode *inode) { ... } into: struct inode *thingyfs_iget(struct super_block *sp, unsigned long ino) { struct inode *inode; int ret; inode = iget_locked(sb, ino); if (!inode) return ERR_PTR(-ENOMEM); if (!(inode->i_state & I_NEW)) return inode; ... unlock_new_inode(inode); return inode; error: iget_failed(inode); return ERR_PTR(ret); } and then call thingyfs_iget() rather than iget(): ret = -EINVAL; inode = iget(sb, ino); if (!inode || is_bad_inode(inode)) goto error; becomes: inode = thingyfs_iget(sb, ino); if (IS_ERR(inode)) { ret = PTR_ERR(inode); goto error; } There were exceptions; most notably it appeared FAT should be calling ilookup() not iget(). Additionally, HPPFS and HOSTFS (UM-specific filesystems) really need checking: hostfs_kern.c: (*) hostfs_iget() should perhaps subsume init_inode() and hostfs_read_inode(). (*) It would appear that all hostfs inodes are the same inode because iget() was being called with inode number 0 - which forms the lookup key. hppfs_kern.c: (*) The HPPFS inode retains a pointer to the proc dentry it is shadowing, but whilst it does appear to retain a reference to it, it doesn't appear to destroy the reference if the inode goes away. (*) hppfs_iget() should perhaps subsume init_inode() and hppfs_read_inode(). (*) It would appear that all hppfs inodes are the same inode because iget() was being called with inode number 0, which forms the lookup key. David - 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