Re: Adding linux_link(2) system call, second round

["Roland C. Dowdeswell" <elric%imrryr.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Aug 02, 2011 at 08:52:56AM +0000, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:
>

> On Mon, Aug 01, 2011 at 07:20:30PM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> > Sure. But what does it actually do, such that if you have a symlink it
> > doesn't work to copy the symlink instead of hardlink it?
> 
> That would probably work for symlinks, since they cannot be updated.
> But this would requires heavy changes in the way the code is written. 
> Basically a rename on a symlink would become a readlink/symlink/unlink.
> This is not really a portability patch, it is a code rewrite which would
> consume more time than I can afford here. I suspect glusterfs developpers 
> will have to do it if they want to support something else than Linux, but 
> I have no idea when, therefore it is not wise to hold our breath on it.
> 
> llink(2) is a simple change, FreeBSD already went there with linkat(2),
> and it makes everything simple. 

It looks like linkat(2) is POSIX.1-2008 and is implemented by Linux
as well as FreeBSD.  It might be the more portable direction to go.

--
    Roland Dowdeswell                      http://Imrryr.ORG/~elric/