[PATCH 02/18] xstat: Add a pair of system calls to make extended file stats available [ver #6]

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Saturday 2010-07-31 20:41, Andreas Dilger wrote:
>On 2010-07-30, at 12:11, Trond Myklebust wrote:
>> Your Mac has a perfectly functional CIFS client, as do your Linux boxes.
>> They both interoperate just fine with Samba, and would presumably
>> continue to do so if someone were to decide to reuse the ctime field on
>> your Samba box as storage for a create time.
>
>CIFS doesn't support symlinks (they just appear as the referenced
>file), so I've had applications that scan the filesystem recurse
>indefinitely due to symlinked directories on a CIFS share appearing
>as hard-linked directories on the client. This doesn't happen when
>the filesystem is accessed via NFS.

This shouldn't go on indefinitely - PATH_MAX is reached at some point.