On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 09:34:07AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote: > On Fri, 2017-02-17 at 02:55 +0000, Al Viro wrote: > > On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 07:56:30AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote: > > > > > > Hi James, > > > > > > > > Should it be "return d_splice_alias()" so that if we find an > > > > alias it is returned back to caller and passed in dentry can be > > > > freed. Though I don't know in what cases alias can be found. And > > > > if alias is found how do we make sure alias_dentry->d_fsdata is > > > > pointing to new (real dentry). > > > > > > It probably should be for the sake of the pattern. In our case I > > > don't think we can have any root aliases because the root dentry is > > > always pinned in the cache, so cache lookup should always find it. > > > > What does that have to do with root dentry? The real reason why that > > code works (FVerySVO) is that the damn thing allocates a new inode > > every time. Including the hardlinks, BTW. > > Yes, this is a known characteristic of stacked filesystems. Is there > some magic I don't know about that would make it easier to reflect hard > links as aliases? I think overlayfs had the same issue in the beginning and miklos fixed it. commit 51f7e52dc943468c6929fa0a82d4afac3c8e9636 Author: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri Jul 29 12:05:24 2016 +0200 ovl: share inode for hard link Vivek