Jeff, These patches bring the NFS connectable file handles feature to userspace servers. They rely on Christian's and Aleksa's changes recently merged to v6.12. It may not be the best timing for posting RFC patches in the middle of the merge window and during LPC, but at least this gives you a chance to gossip about how bad an idea this is with folks ;) I am aware of the usability implications with connectable file handles, which are not consistent throughout the inode lifetime (i.e. when moved to another parent), but the nfsd feature does exists and some users (me) are interested in exporting this feature to userspace. The API I chose for encoding conenctable file handles is pretty conventional (AT_HANDLE_CONNECTABLE). The API I chose for decoding a connected fd is a bit whacky, but if you let it sink, it could make sense - my use case is to examine an object's current path given a previously connectable encoded file handle. By requesting to open an O_PATH fd, relative to an O_PATH mount_fd, I would like to get an error (ESTALE) if the path connecting mount_fd to the would-be-opened fd is unknown. Thought and flames are welcome. Thanks, Amir. Amir Goldstein (2): fs: name_to_handle_at() support for connectable file handles fs: open_by_handle_at() support for decoding connectable file handles fs/fhandle.c | 85 +++++++++++++++++++++++++------------- include/uapi/linux/fcntl.h | 1 + 2 files changed, 58 insertions(+), 28 deletions(-) -- 2.34.1