text: 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.> > -hpaThat's why I put fatattrs in the system namespace, which is wholly ownedby the Linux kernel. Any theoretical FAT-with-xattrs variant would putthose xattrs in the user namespace.On another note, NTFS-style xattrs (aka named streams) are unrelated toLinux xattrs. A named stream is a separate file with a funny name, whilea Linux xattr is a named extension to struct stat.--