Path names

Path name lookup involves a succession of calls to dirlookup, one for each path component.

Look up and return the inode for a path name

After called skipelem, at the beginning of each iteration,: inode points to the parent node. path points to next lookup path. name points to the current directory name. If we want to return parent, we just return the current inode. Otherwise, we find the inode of ‘name`, and return it.

// Look up and return the inode for a path name.
// If parent != 0, return the inode for the parent and copy the final
// path element into name, which must have room for DIRSIZ bytes.
// Must be called inside a transaction since it calls iput().
static struct inode*
namex(char *path, int nameiparent, char *name)
{
  struct inode *ip, *next;

  if(*path == ‘/‘)
    ip = iget(ROOTDEV, ROOTINO);
  else
    ip = idup(myproc()->cwd);

  while((path = skipelem(path, name)) != 0){
    ilock(ip);
    if(ip->type != T_DIR){
      iunlockput(ip);
      return 0;
    }
    if(nameiparent && *path == ‘\0’){
      // Stop one level early.
      iunlock(ip);
      return ip;
    }
    if((next = dirlookup(ip, name, 0)) == 0){
      iunlockput(ip);
      return 0;
    }
    iunlockput(ip);
    ip = next;
  }
  if(nameiparent){
    iput(ip);
    return 0;
  }
  return ip;
}

Helper

// Copy the next path element from path into name.
// Return a pointer to the element following the copied one.
// The returned path has no leading slashes,
// so the caller can check *path==‘\0’ to see if the name is the last one.
// If no name to remove, return 0.
//
// Examples:
//   skipelem(“a/bb/c”, name) = “bb/c”, setting name = “a”
//   skipelem(“///a//bb”, name) = “bb”, setting name = “a”
//   skipelem(“a”, name) = “”, setting name = “a”
//   skipelem(“”, name) = skipelem(“////“, name) = 0
//
static char*
skipelem(char *path, char *name)
{
  char *s;
  int len;

  while(*path == ‘/‘)
    path++;
  if(*path == 0)
    return 0;
  s = path;
  while(*path != ‘/‘ && *path != 0)
    path++;
  len = path - s;
  if(len >= DIRSIZ)
    memmove(name, s, DIRSIZ);
  else {
    memmove(name, s, len);
    name[len] = 0;
  }
  while(*path == ‘/‘)
    path++;
  return path;
}

My Drawing

Find path “a/b/c". 3 iterations.

Example of finding path

Races and deadlock

Only lock one inode at a time, for getting the next directory, only reference count is incremented.

Avoiding deadlock.

For example, next points to the same inode as ip when looking up “.”. Locking next before releasing the lock on ip would result in a deadlock. To avoid this deadlock, namex unlocks the directory before obtaining a lock on next. Here again we see why the separation between iget and ilock is important.