Prior to 2.6.38 automount would not trigger on either stat(2) or
lstat(2) on the automount point.
After 2.6.38, with the introduction of the ->d_automount()
infrastructure, stat(2) and others would start triggering automount
while lstat(2), etc. still would not. This is a regression and a
userspace ABI change.
It appears that there was an attempt at fixing various userspace tools
to not trigger the automount. But since the stat system call is
rather common it is impossible to "fix" all userspace.
This patch reverts the original behavior, which is to not trigger on
stat(2) and other symlink following syscalls.
[ It's not really clear what the right behavior is. Apparently Solaris
does the "automount on stat, leave alone on lstat". And some programs
can get unhappy when "stat+open+fstat" ends up giving a different
result from the fstat than from the initial stat.
But the change in 2.6.38 resulted in problems for some people, so
we're going back to old behavior. Maybe we can re-visit this
discussion at some future date - Linus ]
Reported-by: Leonardo Chiquitto <leonardo.lists@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz> Acked-by: Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net> Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Cc: stable@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>