vfs: add whiteout support

Whiteout isn't actually a new file type, but is represented as a char
device (Linus's idea) with 0/0 device number.

This has several advantages compared to introducing a new whiteout file
type:

 - no userspace API changes (e.g. trivial to make backups of upper layer
   filesystem, without losing whiteouts)

 - no fs image format changes (you can boot an old kernel/fsck without
   whiteout support and things won't break)

 - implementation is trivial

Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>

1 files changed, 14 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/namei.c b/fs/namei.c
index 77fd536106cb..d20191c0ebf5 100644
--- a/fs/namei.c
+++ b/fs/namei.c
@@ -4346,6 +4346,20 @@ SYSCALL_DEFINE2(rename, const char __user *, oldname, const char __user *, newna
         return sys_renameat2(AT_FDCWD, oldname, AT_FDCWD, newname, 0);
 }
 
+int vfs_whiteout(struct inode *dir, struct dentry *dentry)
+{
+        int error = may_create(dir, dentry);
+        if (error)
+                return error;
+
+        if (!dir->i_op->mknod)
+                return -EPERM;
+
+        return dir->i_op->mknod(dir, dentry,
+                                S_IFCHR | WHITEOUT_MODE, WHITEOUT_DEV);
+}
+EXPORT_SYMBOL(vfs_whiteout);
+
 int readlink_copy(char __user *buffer, int buflen, const char *link)
 {
         int len = PTR_ERR(link);