> need to be done once, and it would not be necessary to increment the
> refcount artificially. Could anyone with a good understanding of the fs
> code comment on this? I would particularly like to here what Alan thinks.
The refcount is bumped otherwise you may get a race when an inode is freed
by another user.
> Secondly there are many places in the code where pointers are checked to
> see if they are NULL. Frequently the result is not fatal, but by inspecting
On the bigger kernel NULL is a valid getblk return for a block I/O error.
>
