On Sat, Jul 14, 2018 at 10:35 AM Pavel Machek <pa...@ucw.cz> wrote: > > Could we allocate -ve entries from separate slab?
No, because negative dentrires don't stay negative. Every single positive dentry starts out as a negative dentry that is passed in to "lookup()" to maybe be made positive. And most of the time they <i>do</i> turn positive, because most of the time people actually open files that exist. But then occasionally you don't, because you're just blindly opening a filename whether it exists or not (to _check_ whether it's there). Linus