Re: dreaddir/fxattr

[shenson@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Stephen Henson)]

I'm still not sure about this. The delay of readdir/stat is caused by the
multiple file lookups (e.g. several directory searches if it's a full path).
Things which don't use the new syscall wont win. Also is it intended that the
new library would use this syscall to reduce the work in certain situations
(e.g. automatically with readdir).
	Since this involves messing with the kernel, why not use a cookie 
cache which is then backwards compatible and speeds up *all* multiple 
operations on the same file (the lib is full of these) instead of just
optimising the readdir/xattr case.
	I could do this with an LRU cache in Minixfs lookup/readdir but it's
best in the kernel to speed up all filesystems and to have path as opposed to
directory dependency.
Steve.