Re: [Ext2-devel] [PATCH 1/2] ext2/3: Support 2^32-1 blocks(Kernel)

From: Stephen C. Tweedie
Date: Mon Mar 27 2006 - 15:37:52 EST


Hi,

On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 22:05 +0200, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> Now, a non-Hurd system is not going to have any use for the gnu.*
> xattr semantics, as translator is a Hurd-specific concept.
>
> gnu.* doesn't just concern itself with translators, it can also be
> gnu.author (or some such) which is a normal UID, which GNU/Linux can
> support without any problems.

OK, but would it have any active semantics on non-Hurd kernels? How
would the behaviour of ext3 change in the presence of a gnu.author
attribute on a file?

It would certainly be possible to add a generic ext2/3 namespace handler
to allow those fields to be set on, say, Linux hosts; but that would
just be a matter of matching the gnu.* syscall xattr encoding to the
EXT2_XATTR_INDEX_GNU on-disk encoding; it wouldn't actually deal with
any semantic expectations surrounding the use of those fields.

--Stephen


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