FAT, NTFS, CIFS and DOS attributes

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Mon Jan 03 2005 - 17:45:52 EST


Hello all,

I recently posted to LKML a patch to get or set DOS attribute flags for fatfs. That patch used ioctl(). It was suggested that a better way would be using xattrs, although the xattr mechanism seems clumsy to me, and has namespace issues.

I also think it would be good to have a unified interface for FAT, NTFS and CIFS for these attributes.

I noticed that CIFS has a placeholder "user.DosAttrib" in cifs/xattr.c, although it doesn't seem to be implemented.

Questions:

a) is xattr the right thing? It seems to be a fairly complex and ill-thought-out mechanism all along, especially the whole namespace business (what is a system attribute to one filesystem is a user attribute to another, for example.)

b) if xattr is the right thing, shouldn't this be in the system namespace rather than the user namespace?

c) What should the representation be? Binary byte? String containing a subset of "rhsvda67" (barf)?

-hpa
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/