a) struct inode is not going to be freed under ->d_compare();
however, the thing PROC_I(inode)->sysctl points to just might.
Fortunately, it's enough to make freeing that sucker delayed,
provided that we don't step on its ->unregistering, clear
the pointer to it in PROC_I(inode) before dropping the reference
and check if it's NULL in ->d_compare().
b) I'm not sure that we *can* walk into NULL inode here (we recheck
dentry->seq between verifying that it's still hashed / fetching
dentry->d_inode and passing it to ->d_compare() and there's no
negative hashed dentries in /proc/sys/*), but if we can walk into
that, we really should not have ->d_compare() return 0 on it!
Said that, I really suspect that this check can be simply killed.
Nick?