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Date:   Thu, 25 Jun 2020 16:07:19 -0400
From:   "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>
To:     Frank van der Linden <fllinden@amazon.com>
Cc:     chuck.lever@oracle.com, linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 00/10] server side user xattr support (RFC 8276)
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On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 05:39:16PM +0000, Frank van der Linden wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 12:53:47PM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> > CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you can confirm the sender and know the content is safe.
> > 
> > By the way, I can't remember if I asked this before: is there a
> > particular use case that motivates this xattr work?
> 
> There's one use case that I can't really talk about publicly at this point
> (and it's not my code either, so I wouldn't have all the details). Nothing
> super secret or anything - it's just something that is not mine,
> so I won't try to speak for anyone. We wanted to get this upstreamed first,
> as that's the right thing to do.
> 
> Since I posted my first RFC, I did get contacted off-list by several
> readers of linux-nfs who wanted to use the feature in practice, too, so
> there's definitely interest out there.

Yeah, I always hear a lot of interest but then have trouble sorting
through it for the cases that are actually *user* xattr cases, where the
server has to just act as a dumb store of the values.

There are some.  But unfortunately xattrs are best known for enabling
selinux and posix acls, and to a lesser extent accessing random other
filesystem features, so that tends to be what comes to people's minds
first, though it's not what we're doing.

--b.