On Fri, Aug 25, 2017, at 10:47 AM, Jan Kara wrote: > > It is possible that some of these dentries are so rarely used that they are > indeed just a waste In some cases - think containers, or ostree-style root filesystem snapshots, if we do an `rm -rf /path/to/container-root`, userspace knows for a fact that nothing will reference those paths again - all of the processes that could have been killed. There's no point to having negative dentries for them. Maybe something like unlinkat (dfd, path, AT_UNLINKAT_DONTNEED), like madvise (MAV_DONTNEED) ?
