The autofs4 module doesn't consider symlinks for expire as it did in the
older autofs v3 module (so it's actually a long standing regression).
The user space daemon has focused on the use of bind mounts instead of
symlinks for a long time now and that's why this has not been noticed.
But with the future addition of amd map parsing to automount(8), not to
mention amd itself (of am-utils), symlink expiry will be needed.
The direct and offset mount types can't be symlinks and the tree mounts of
version 4 were always real mounts so only indirect mounts need expire
symlinks.
Since the current users of the autofs4 module haven't reported this as a
problem to date this patch probably isn't a candidate for backport to
stable.
Signed-off-by: Ian Kent <ikent@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>