This patchset is a respin of the one I sent on July 26th. The main reason for the resend is to deal with some recent changes in namei.c that created some merge conflicts. This series depends on the "audit" series that I also sent on July 26th. That set didn't need any changes, so I'm not planning to resend it. This set is also available via the "estale" branch of my git tree: git://git.samba.org/jlayton/linux.git estale I'd like to see this go in for 3.7 if at all possible. The original cover letter text follows: ESTALE errors are a source of pain for many users, primarily those who are doing work on NFS. When userspace provides a path to a syscall, then there's really little excuse for returning ESTALE. If userspace gave us a path that we had to lookup in order to do the call, then it's not particularly helpful to return ESTALE just because that path went stale before we could do the actual operation. We can and should do better here. The kernel should instead catch that error and retry the lookup and call, while forcing a revalidation of all dentries involved. Unfortunately fixing this requires touching the syscalls themselves, or at least their immediate helper functions. Not all syscalls can be retried -- only those that take a pathname as an argument. With this patchset, I've decided to take the relatively less controversial approach of just having the kernel retry once when it gets an ESTALE error. I still think that it's not as strong as it should be, but it should improve the situation in many common cases. I've also tried to engineer this in such a way that if we do decide that we need to retry more than once, then it should be easy to change that later. This should cover all of the syscalls in fs/stat.c and fs/namei.c, and a few from fs/open.c. Once these are merged, I'll look at adding similar handling to other path-based syscalls in a later set. A quick look shows that we have about 50-odd path-based syscalls that will need similar handling, so this is just a start. Jeff Layton (19): vfs: add a retry_estale helper function to handle retries on ESTALE vfs: add a kern_path_at function vfs: make fstatat retry on ESTALE errors from getattr call vfs: fix readlinkat to retry on ESTALE vfs: remove user_path_at_empty vfs: turn "empty" arg in getname_flags into a bool vfs: add new "reval" argument to kern_path_create vfs: fix mknodat to retry on ESTALE errors vfs: fix mkdir to retry on ESTALE errors vfs: fix symlinkat to retry on ESTALE errors vfs: fix linkat to retry on ESTALE errors vfs: make rmdir retry on ESTALE errors vfs: make do_unlinkat retry on ESTALE errors vfs: fix renameat to retry on ESTALE errors vfs: remove user_path_parent vfs: have do_sys_truncate retry once on an ESTALE error vfs: have faccessat retry once on an ESTALE error vfs: have chdir retry lookup and call once on ESTALE error vfs: make chroot retry once on ESTALE error drivers/base/devtmpfs.c | 7 +- fs/namei.c | 357 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------------------ fs/open.c | 234 ++++++++++++++++++------------- fs/stat.c | 44 ++++-- include/linux/fs.h | 22 +++ include/linux/namei.h | 4 +- net/unix/af_unix.c | 2 +- 7 files changed, 422 insertions(+), 248 deletions(-) -- 1.7.11.2 -- 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