VFS considers each directory a file that contains a list of files and other directories.Once a directory entry is read into memory, however, it is transformed by the VFS into a dentry object based on the dentry structure.The kernel creates a dentry object for every component of a pathname that a process looks up; the dentry object associates the component to its corresponding inode. For example, when looking up the /tmp/test pathname, the kernel creates a dentry object for the / root directory, a second dentry object for the tmp entry of the root directory, and a third dentry object for the test entry of the /tmp directory.
