Hi Al, There seems to be a general problem of races in accessing the inode structure at the moment. Again it's due to the lifting of the global kernel lock. For instance, the i_mode can be referenced almost anywhere in the VFS. The i_size is used frequently in the MM. Both these quantities can change at any time after the struct inode has been initialized, and could lead to problems if we have races. Would it perhaps be an idea to set up an interface in fs/inode.c for reading and setting some of the most race-prone elements? You could then protect such operations globally using the inode_lock. Cheers, Trond
