Subject: Re: [PATCH] get/set FAT filesystem attribute bits
From: Nicholas Miell <nmiell@comcast.net>
To: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
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Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 13:46:56 -0800
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On Mon, 2005-01-03 at 13:35 -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Nicholas Miell wrote:
> > Instead of adding another ioctl, wouldn't an xattr be more appropriate?
> > For instance, system.fatattrs containing a text representation of the
> > attribute bits.
> > 
> 
> This really worries me, because it's not clear to me that Microsoft 
> isn't going to add NTFS-style xattrs to FAT in the future.  There is a 
> very specific reason why they might want to do that: since they want to 
> keep NTFS secret and proprietary, FAT is the published interchange 
> format that other devices can use to exchange data with MS operating 
> systems.  If we then have overloaded the xattr mechanism, that would be 
> very ugly.
> 
> 	-hpa

That's why I put fatattrs in the system namespace, which is wholly owned
by the Linux kernel. Any theoretical FAT-with-xattrs variant would put
those xattrs in the user namespace.

On another note, NTFS-style xattrs (aka named streams) are unrelated to
Linux xattrs. A named stream is a separate file with a funny name, while
a Linux xattr is a named extension to struct stat.
-- 
Nicholas Miell <nmiell@comcast.net>

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