One of the things that came up in a recent security thread (how to use
   HOSTALIASES safely in a set-uid program) was that it would be nice for
   userland to be able to ask the kernel to only open a regular file.
   This ability is important as it means that untrusted path names
   ($HOSTALIASES for example) can't be used to open devices. Remember
   that some devices have implicit behaviors on open. Like certain tape
   nodes imply reqinding before open.

What effect does your patch have on opening files which are symbolic links?
Would open() still follow links to regular files?  If not, isn't this
debilitating?

Ben