In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ntfs: ->d_compare() must not block ... so don't use __getname() there. Switch it (and ntfs_d_hash(), while we are at it) to kmalloc(PATH_MAX, GFP_NOWAIT). Yes, ntfs_d_hash() almost certainly can do with smaller allocations, but let ntfs folks deal with that - keep the allocation size as-is for now. Stop abusing names_cachep in ntfs, period - various uses of that thing in there have nothing to do with pathnames; just use k[mz]alloc() and be done with that. For now let's keep sizes as-in, but AFAICS none of the users actually want PATH_MAX.