Patch series (#work.cifs in vfs.git) tries to clean the things up in and around build_path_from_dentry(). Part of that is constifying the pointers around that stuff, then it lifts the allocations into callers and finally switches build_path_from_dentry() to using dentry_path_raw() instead of open-coding it. Handling of ->d_name and friends is subtle enough, and it would be better to have fewer places besides fs/d_path.c that need to mess with those... Help with review and testing would be very much appreciated - there's a plenty of mount options/server combinations ;-/ For those who prefer to look at it in git, it lives in git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs.git #work.cifs; individual patches go in followups. Shortlog: Al Viro (7): cifs: don't cargo-cult strndup() cifs: constify get_normalized_path() properly cifs: constify path argument of ->make_node() cifs: constify pathname arguments in a bunch of helpers cifs: make build_path_from_dentry() return const char * cifs: allocate buffer in the caller of build_path_from_dentry() cifs: switch build_path_from_dentry() to using dentry_path_raw() 1) a bunch of kstrdup() calls got cargo-culted as kstrndup(). This is unidiomatic *and* pointless - it's not any "safer" that way (pass it a non-NUL-terminated array, and strlen() will barf same as kstrdup()) and it's actually a pessimization. Converted to plain kstrdup() calls. 2) constifying pathnames: get_normalized_path() gets a constant string and, on success, returns either that string or its modified copy. It is declared with the wrong prototype - int get_normalized_path(const char *path, char **npath) so the caller might get a non-const alias of the original const string. Fortunately, none of the callers actually use that alias to modify the string, so it's not an active bug - just the wrong typization. 3) constifying pathnames: ->make_node(). Unlike the rest of methods that take pathname as an argument, it has that argument declared as char *, not const char *. Pure misannotation, since all instances never modify that actual string (or pass it to anything that might do the same). 4) constifying pathnames: a bunch of helpers. Several functions have pathname argument declared as char *, when const char * would be fine - they neither modify the string nor pass it to anything that might. 5) constifying pathnames: build_path_from_dentry(). That's the main source of pathnames; all callers are actually treating the string it returns as constant one. Declare it to return const char * and adjust the callers. 6) take buffer allocation out of build_path_from_dentry(). Trying to do exact-sized allocation is pointless - allocated object are short-lived anyway (the caller is always the one to free the string it gets from build_path_from_dentry()). As the matter of fact, we are in the same situation as with pathname arguments of syscalls - short-lived allocations limited to 4Kb and freed before the caller returns to userland. So we can just do allocations from names_cachep and do that in the caller; that way we don't need to bother with GFP_ATOMIC allocations. Moreover, having the caller do allocations will permit us to switch build_path_from_dentry() to use of dentry_path_raw() (in the next commit). 7) build_path_from_dentry() essentially open-codes dentry_path_raw(); the difference is that it wants to put the result in the beginning of the buffer (which we don't need anymore, since the caller knows what to free anyway) _and_ we might want '\\' for component separator instead of the normal '/'. It's easier to use dentry_path_raw() and (optionally) post-process the result, replacing all '/' with '\\'. Note that the last part needs profiling - I would expect it to be noise (we have just formed the string and it's all in hot cache), but that needs to be verified. Diffstat: fs/cifs/cifs_dfs_ref.c | 14 +++-- fs/cifs/cifsglob.h | 2 +- fs/cifs/cifsproto.h | 19 +++++-- fs/cifs/connect.c | 9 +-- fs/cifs/dfs_cache.c | 41 +++++++------- fs/cifs/dir.c | 148 ++++++++++++++++++------------------------------- fs/cifs/file.c | 79 +++++++++++++------------- fs/cifs/fs_context.c | 2 +- fs/cifs/inode.c | 110 ++++++++++++++++++------------------ fs/cifs/ioctl.c | 13 +++-- fs/cifs/link.c | 46 +++++++++------ fs/cifs/misc.c | 2 +- fs/cifs/readdir.c | 15 ++--- fs/cifs/smb1ops.c | 6 +- fs/cifs/smb2ops.c | 19 ++++--- fs/cifs/unc.c | 4 +- fs/cifs/xattr.c | 40 +++++++------ 17 files changed, 278 insertions(+), 291 deletions(-)