Original GSoC Task Description

For historical reasons, UNIX filesystems have a real (hard) .. link from each directory pointing to its parent. However, this is problematic, because the meaning of "parent" really depends on context. If you have a symlink for example, you can reach a certain node in the filesystem by a different path. If you go to .. from there, UNIX will traditionally take you to the hard-coded parent node -- but this is usually not what you want. Usually you want to go back to the logical parent from which you came. That is called "lexical" resolution.

Some application already use lexical resolution internally for that reason. It is generally agreed that many problems could be avoided if the standard filesystem lookup calls used lexical resolution as well. The compatibility problems probably would be negligible.

The goal of this project is to modify the filename lookup mechanism in the Hurd to use lexical resolution, and to check that the system is still fully functional afterwards. This task requires understanding the filename resolution mechanism.

See also GNU Savannah bug #17133.

Possible mentors: Carl Fredrik Hammar (cfhammar)

Exercise: This project requires changes to the name lookup mechanism in the Hurd-related glibc parts, as well as the Hurd servers. Thus, the exercise task should involve hacking glibc or Hurd servers, or even both. Fixing the bug in the client-side nfs translator (/hurd/nfs) that makes "rmdir foo/" fail while "rmdir foo" works, seems a good candidate.