On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 02:43:44PM +0100, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:

Yes, and you can get the performance back if you allow negative dentries to 
be created.  You just have to make sure that every time a directory entry 
is created in directory X, all negative dentries which are children of 
directory X are thrown away.

We might even be able to optimize this a little by calling d_compare on
each alias to see if it hashes down to the same one down in the fs.