getdents64 problem in 2.6.23

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 15:47 +0200, Joakim Tjernlund wrote:
> started to use 2.6.23 in our development system a few days ago and
> now I got problems when deleting files from a large directory
> structure. A rm -rf does not delete all files.
> 
> Did a strace and found that some files does not appear in the
> strace, the same ones that doesn't get deleted.

Following up on the IRC conversation... the problem here is the horrid
readdir() interface, and how it interacts with f_pos on the directory's
file descriptor. The file position simply represents the offset within
the linked list of dirents -- which used to be fairly safe, because when
we unlinked something, we'd write out a 'deletion dirent', which would
serve as a placeholder in the list.

Someone changed that code recently though, and those deletion dirents
are no longer written on NOR flash.... :)

The answer is probably to keep a 'deletion dirent' in the f->dents list
of jffs2_full_dirents, but with NULL for the 'raw' field. I think that
shouldn't break any other part of the code. Then you'd want to remove
those dummy dirents when the filedescriptor for the directory in
question is closed.

-- 
dwmw2