On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 17:00:16 +0000 Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 11:53:13AM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote: > > > No it will not be fine. You should not be using dentry at all. I thought > > this was going to convert debugfs over to kernfs. The debugfs_node should > > be using kernfs and completely eliminate the use of dentry. > > I disagree, actually - kernfs is an awful model for anything, sysfs included... Then what would you suggest? It's the only generic system that is appropriate for control features, where the underlining "files" are actually functions to modify or query information from the kernel. The entire VFS layer is designed for efficient management of some kind of storage device, where the only interaction with the storage device is through VFS. For pseudo file systems like debugfs, sysfs and tracefs, the underlining "storage" is the kernel itself, where we need a way for the "storage" part to work with the kernel. The VFS layer doesn't give that, which is why debugfs and tracefs used dentry as that interface, as the dentry does represent the underlining storage.
