VFS: Add VFS helper functions for setting up private namespaces

The purpose of this patch is to improve the remote mount path lookup
support for distributed filesystems such as the NFSv4 client.

When given a mount command of the form "mount server:/foo/bar /mnt", the
NFSv4 client is required to look up the filehandle for "server:/", and
then look up each component of the remote mount path "foo/bar" in order
to find the directory that is actually going to be mounted on /mnt.
Following that remote mount path may involve following symlinks,
crossing server-side mount points and even following referrals to
filesystem volumes on other servers.

Since the standard VFS path lookup code already supports walking paths
that contain all these features (using in-kernel automounts for
following referrals) we would like to be able to reuse that rather than
duplicate the full path traversal functionality in the NFSv4 client code.

This patch therefore defines a VFS helper function create_mnt_ns(), that
sets up a temporary filesystem namespace and attaches a root filesystem to
it. It exports the create_mnt_ns() and put_mnt_ns() function for use by
filesystem modules.

Signed-off-by: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mnt_namespace.h b/include/linux/mnt_namespace.h
index 299d11af5f79..3beb2592b03f 100644
--- a/include/linux/mnt_namespace.h
+++ b/include/linux/mnt_namespace.h
@@ -24,6 +24,7 @@ struct proc_mounts {
 
 struct fs_struct;
 
+extern struct mnt_namespace *create_mnt_ns(struct vfsmount *mnt);
 extern struct mnt_namespace *copy_mnt_ns(unsigned long, struct mnt_namespace *,
 		struct fs_struct *);
 extern void put_mnt_ns(struct mnt_namespace *ns);