On Fri, Aug 23, 2002 at 05:07:51PM +0530, Saji Kumar VR wrote: > Can some one please tell why do we need dentry? cant we just have inode > pointer directly from file structure? what is the advantage? how its used to > increase performance? It does not increase performance. It's just the inode does not happen to give all the information needed. Remember, that eg. permissions depend on the whole path, because you can be stopped by a directory without "execute" permission. And there can be more than one dentry to a single inode. Most disk filesystems would do without knowledge of dentry once file is open. NFS and other network filesystems won't. (dentry is a shorthand for directory entry - it's there to hold content of directories and because of hardlinks this information won't fit in the inode). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <bulb@ucw.cz> -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
