Fun with symlinks

Symbolic links complicate the processing greatly.

Let's spend a little more time with the line:

if (
  S_ISLNK (components [ncomponents - 1].attr -> attr.mode)
  &&
    (
      components [ncomponents].name
      || (cmsg -> eflag & _IO_CONNECT_EFLAG_DIR)
      || !S_ISLNK (cmsg -> mode)
    )
   )
{

I've broken it out over a few more lines to clarify the logical relationships. The very first condition (the one that uses the macro S_ISLNK()) gates the entire if clause. If the entry we are looking at is not a symlink, we can give up right away, and continue to the next statement.

Next, we examine a three-part OR condition. We perform the redirection if any of the following conditions is true:

In case we need to follow the symlink, we don't do it ourselves! It's not the job of this resource manager's connect functions to follow the symlink. All we need to do is call redirect_symlink() and it will reply with a redirect message back to the client's open() (or other connect function call). All clients' open() calls know how to handle the redirection, and they (the clients) are responsible for retrying the operation with the new information from the resource manager.

To clarify:

So, it's important to note that after the RAM disk performed the “redirect” function, it was out of the loop after that point.