On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 11:03:38AM +0800, Ian Kent wrote:

I also have a sick feeling that dentrys may become negative at any point
after __d_lookup_rcu() .....

Yes.  To get stability of ->d_inode (assuming the sucker isn't pinned down
in normal way by ->d_count) you need ->d_lock.

quoted

Ho-hum...  I can reach RHTS, but I'd rather do that at home boxen, if
possible...  Has it been reproduced on UP boxen with SMP kernels, BTW?

Nope, I'd need to build a kernel specifically for that. I'm not sure how
useful that would be though since the test is specifically meant to
expose problems with multiple concurrent processes accessing an
automount tree. I don't see any problem running the Connectathon tests
which is essentially one automount and one client process.

Heh...  No, it's just that the only SMP box I have locally right now
is dual ultrasparc.  Anyway, I can live with RHTS.