[BBLISA] Mapping inode numbers to file names

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> From: John Stoffel [mailto:john at stoffel.org]
> 
> It's a hard hard problem I agree.  As disks get larger, and people get
> more forgetful, it's not easy to keep up with indexing stuff.  Esp if
> the performance hit is too high and impacts the user's experience.

This may be fuel for the peace pipe and nothing more, but...  Each inode
contain a link count.  Most of the time, each inode has a link count of 1,
but of course that can't be assumed.  It seems trivially simple to me, that
along with the link count, the filesystem could also store a list of which
inodes link to it.  If link count is 2, then there's a list of 2 inodes,
which are the "parents" of this inode.

In which case, it would be trivially easy to walk back up the whole tree,
almost instantly identifying every combination of paths that could possibly
lead to this inode, while simultaneously squelching any security concerns
about bypassing security of parent directories and everything.

It seems too perfect and too simple.  Instead of a one-directional directed
graph, simply make a bidirectional.  There's no significant additional
overhead as far as I can tell.  It seems like it would even be easy.