[linux-cifs-client] Re: [PATCH] cifs: remove useless cargo-cult checks

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 12:51:04PM -0600, Steven French wrote:
> > file->f_path.dentry or file->f_path.dentry.d_inode can't be NULL
> 
> OK - I don't really mind removing these checks - and I agree that I there
> is not an obvious way that they can be null, yet we had a case in which
> file->f_dentry was reported as NULL a few years back in a bug report that
> we could not reproduce.

There's a good reason you couldn't reproduce it, because it most likely
must have been a really bad hack in the submitters kernel.  Setting
up file->f_dentry is one of the first thing we do after allocating the
file struct.

> 
> The change to f_path.dentry did hit all filesystems (not sure who did it
> last year) and that patch did hit lkml - so this is not something new that
> just slipped in.

I know - that patch just made the enormous amount of useless checks
vissible.

> Is there an easy way to mirror particular patches going into the
> cifs-2.6.git tree (which is pulled into mm) to lkml?

Maybe some git expert can comment on that.

> The cifs patches go in mm for at least a week before they go into kernel
> but some of them I would like to post again to lkml.

polling -mm is a little hard as it's an enormous blob, so posting to
lkml or -fsdevel would definitively be quite helpfull.