Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Fri, 14 Apr 2000, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> >
> > However because I can't keep persistent information attached to a dentry,
> > I may need to add some lightweight skeleton to remember it. Otherwise
> > you can really kill a machine's performance with lots of rapid failing
> > requests.
>
> You do have the dentry flags, but not much else, I agree.
>
> There's nothing fundamentally wrong in pinning even a negative dentry -
> you could pin a negative dentry and have a timeout, and mark it some
> special way in the dentry flags during the timeout. Or something..
>
That's what autofs v3 does. It puts an expiration time in the negative
field.
-hpa
