new helper: lookup_positive_unlocked()

Most of the callers of lookup_one_len_unlocked() treat negatives are
ERR_PTR(-ENOENT).  Provide a helper that would do just that.  Note
that a pinned positive dentry remains positive - it's ->d_inode is
stable, etc.; a pinned _negative_ dentry can become positive at any
point as long as you are not holding its parent at least shared.
So using lookup_one_len_unlocked() needs to be careful;
lookup_positive_unlocked() is safer and that's what the callers
end up open-coding anyway.

Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/namei.c b/fs/namei.c
index ef55155d152f..6f72fb7ef5ad 100644
--- a/fs/namei.c
+++ b/fs/namei.c
@@ -2557,6 +2557,26 @@ struct dentry *lookup_one_len_unlocked(const char *name,
 }
 EXPORT_SYMBOL(lookup_one_len_unlocked);
 
+/*
+ * Like lookup_one_len_unlocked(), except that it yields ERR_PTR(-ENOENT)
+ * on negatives.  Returns known positive or ERR_PTR(); that's what
+ * most of the users want.  Note that pinned negative with unlocked parent
+ * _can_ become positive at any time, so callers of lookup_one_len_unlocked()
+ * need to be very careful; pinned positives have ->d_inode stable, so
+ * this one avoids such problems.
+ */
+struct dentry *lookup_positive_unlocked(const char *name,
+				       struct dentry *base, int len)
+{
+	struct dentry *ret = lookup_one_len_unlocked(name, base, len);
+	if (!IS_ERR(ret) && d_is_negative(ret)) {
+		dput(ret);
+		ret = ERR_PTR(-ENOENT);
+	}
+	return ret;
+}
+EXPORT_SYMBOL(lookup_positive_unlocked);
+
 #ifdef CONFIG_UNIX98_PTYS
 int path_pts(struct path *path)
 {