[linux-cifs-client] [RFC][PATCH] cifs: add helper to simplify handling of unicode strings and use it

[Suresh Jayaraman]

Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 02:43:57PM +0530, Suresh Jayaraman wrote:
>> Based on the recent discussions on opencoded, inconsistent allocation of
>> memory needed for a unicode string conversion, the consensus is to
>> calculate the memory needed exactly instead of using size assumptions
>> and to consolidate some code that allocates memory and does conversion
>> in a helper function and use it widely.
>>
>> This patch attempts to do the same. Please note that non-unicode cases
>> has not been converted now as they are less error-prone than unicode
>> cases. I've only compile tested this patch and yet to test it
>> completely, but posting this little premature patch as there are lot
>> of discussions happening around this code. This patch requires careful
>> review.
>>
>> Thanks to Jeff, Steve and Simo for useful suggestions.
> 
> One little comment before even looking at the code:  would it be useful
> to have some of those helpers in common code?  We have an awful lot of
> filesystems dealing with utf8 or ucs16 encoding with a lot of ad-hoc
> helpers or even worse opencoded handling.

Yes, I think. My quick look at some of the fs/* code suggests that it
needs consistent handling. I'll see whether this helper can me made
generic so that other filesystems could use them too. What other
filesystems (apart from xfs) which you think can benefit from this?

If there are enough canditates, may be we could consider adding this
helper to fs/nls/ ?

Thanks,

-- 
Suresh Jayaraman