Re: [Ocfs2-devel] [PATCH 13/39] ocfs2: Add extended attribute support

[Mark Fasheh]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 10:04:40PM +0800, Tao Ma wrote:
> 
> 
> Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 09:56:41AM +0800, Tiger Yang wrote:
> >> I have looked the patch for btrfs about this. We are different.
> >> Btrfs store the whole xattr name including the prefix "user." 
> >> "trusted.", we store index number instead of it.
> > 
> > I looked at the git tree and there are two users of
> > ocfs2_xattr_handler().
> > 
> >  (1) for using the ->list handler in listattr.  That's something I fixed
> >      in btrfs that I wanted to point you to.  The whole concept of a
> >      ->list handler is stupid, and it was only added as a hack for
> >      the tmpfs "generic" xattr support which is a mess.  Instead of
> >      looking up a handler that would only do the same thing anyway
> >      for all on-disk attributes just call the code directly and
> >      have a map from index to prefix (look at
> >      fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_xattr.c for an example).  You
> >      also have a check for OCFS2_MOUNT_NOUSERXATTR for the user
> >      attributes, but that's much easier done by just checking the
> >      index in an if (and I'd personally just kill it completely, the
> >      options doesn't seem useful - but that's an unrelated bit)
> yes, you are right. The handler for list is borrowed from ext3 and 
> somewhat ugly. We just need the prefix name but use such a complicated 
> method. Just a map from index to prefix should work fine.
> >  
> >  (2) For generating the hash.  I don't quite understand why you want to
> >      also hash the prefix if it's not store on disk anyway but sorted
> >      into the numeric buckets.
> This is done intentionally. See the design doc 
> http://oss.oracle.com/osswiki/OCFS2/DesignDocs/ExtendedAttributes.
> "Each entry has a 32-bit hash value associated with it. The hash value 
> is calculated using the full (prefix.suffix) name of the xattr to avoid 
> hash collisions when the same suffix is used in multiple attribute 
> namespaces. "
> So Mark, do you think we need this prefix hash?
> Anyway, if we make consensus that the hash calculation doesn't need 
> prefix any more, we can remove the ocfs2_xattr_handler safely.

Removing the prefix hash should be fine. Technically, this changes the disk
format, but nobody should be using this for production yet anyway.
	--Mark

--
Mark Fasheh
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