Re: [PATCH 13/28] VFS: Introduce soft reference counts

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 10:45:03AM -0400, Mike Waychison wrote:
> This patch introduces the concept of a 'soft' reference count for a vfsmount.
> This type of reference count allows for references to be held on mountpoints
> that do not affect their busy states for userland unmounting.  Some might
> argue that this is wrong because 'when I unmount a filesystem, I want the
> resources associated with it to go away too', but this way of thinking was
> deprecated with the addition of namespaces and --bind back in the 2.4 series.
> 
> A future addition may see a callback mechanism so that in kernel users can
> use a given mountpoint and have it deregistered some way (quota and
> accounting come to mind).
> 
> These soft reference counts are used by a later patch that adds an interface
> for holding and manipulating mountpoints using filedescriptors.

You haven't explained why you actually need it, though.

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