Re: [PATCH 2.5.3-pre1] Fix NFS dentry lookup behaviour

[Alan Cox]

> all in path_walk() for the special case of accessing cwd. That has 2
> consequences:
> 
>   - open(".") may succeed even if cwd is know to be a stale dentry.
> 
>   - The attribute cache, and hence also the data cache, does not get
>     revalidated. This breaks close-to-open semantics for those who
>     require it, and leads to silly inconsistencies: typically 'ls -l'
>     returning gratuitous "file 'blah' does not exist" errors.

This wants fixing at its vfs root (pardon the pun). NFS is not the only
afflicted file system here. Clustered file systems like opengfs face the
same problems where "." can go away from another node