We'd like to make more use of the highly-optimized dcache hash functions throughout the kernel, rather than have every subsystem create its own, and a function that hashes basic null-terminated strings is required for that. (The name is to emphasize that it returns both hash and length.) It's actually useful in the dcache itself, specifically d_alloc_name(). Other uses in the next patch. full_name_hash() is also tweaked to make it more generally useful: 1) Take a "char *" rather than "unsigned char *" argument, to be consistent with hash_name(). 2) Handle zero-length inputs. If we want more callers, we don't want to make them worry about corner cases. Signed-off-by: George Spelvin <linux@sciencehorizons.net>