Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753330Ab0F1ROs (ORCPT ); Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:14:48 -0400 Received: from fn.samba.org ([216.83.154.106]:38044 "EHLO lists.samba.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753201Ab0F1ROq (ORCPT ); Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:14:46 -0400 Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:14:44 -0700 From: Jeremy Allison To: Steve French Cc: Jeremy Allison , David Howells , viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk, jlayton@redhat.com, mcao@us.ibm.com, aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com, linux-cifs@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, samba-technical@lists.samba.org, sjayaraman@suse.de, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] Ext4: Make file creation time, i_version and i_generation available by xattrs Message-ID: <20100628171444.GB9979@samba1> Reply-To: Jeremy Allison References: <20100628162626.6026.26679.stgit@warthog.procyon.org.uk> <20100628164854.GA9979@samba1> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.17+20080114 (2008-01-14) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1730 Lines: 43 On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 12:04:09PM -0500, Steve French wrote: > On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Jeremy Allison wrote: > > On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 11:33:10AM -0500, Steve French wrote: > >> > >> It would be easy enough to do something similar for crtime for cifs > >> (it may also be possible to do something similar to > >> i_generation and i_version at least for smb2 but haven't > >> experimented to see which servers could return something > >> similar to version and generation). ?I did have a request for > >> someone doing a backup application over cifs to return creation > >> time so at least this would make sense. > > > > We already have code in Samba to detect "birthtime" > > (st_btime) as a returned member of a stat struct. > > > > This already works on many other platforms, so I'd > > rather just have Linux stat fixed to work with > > btime. > > That sounds better but it hits the fs, vfs and libc > and seems like libc is near impossible to get changes into. It's a software project, it gets new features. This is a new feature that is necessary to support new file system features. > Seems like in the short term adding xattrs is harmless, and > doesn't hurt in the longrun Yes it does. It's trying to do an end-run around adding this into the entire stack where it'll be useful for all applications. Samba releases live forever. Do you want to be still maintaining the "btime as xattr" stuff in 20 years ? Fix it once, fix it right. Jeremy. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/