From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S267315AbUBSVhU (ORCPT ); Thu, 19 Feb 2004 16:37:20 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S267573AbUBSVf6 (ORCPT ); Thu, 19 Feb 2004 16:35:58 -0500 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:484 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S267386AbUBSVeD (ORCPT ); Thu, 19 Feb 2004 16:34:03 -0500 Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 13:38:45 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds To: viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk cc: Tridge , Jamie Lokier , "H. Peter Anvin" , Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: Eureka! (was Re: UTF-8 and case-insensitivity) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <20040219081027.GB4113@mail.shareable.org> <20040219163838.GC2308@mail.shareable.org> <20040219182948.GA3414@mail.shareable.org> <20040219200554.GE31035@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> <20040219204515.GG31035@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > No no. Look at how this works: > - only one dentry actually exists. That was really badly phrased. There can be _millions_ of these things, but they are all "unique" - they have zero impact on each other, and have no linkages. They never shadow any existing dentries (ie when we create these, we'd obviously never create a tentative dentry with the same name as an existing _valid_ dentry), and they are never visible to the filesystem. So it's not that "only one dentry" exists, but that that this tentative dentry only exists as a unique marker of "a dentry of this name _may_ exist". Linus