From owner-freebsd-fs Fri May 26 7:34: 0 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3249A37B6B3 for ; Fri, 26 May 2000 07:33:50 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Received: from fledge.watson.org (robert@fledge.pr.watson.org [192.0.2.3]) by fledge.watson.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id KAA37463; Fri, 26 May 2000 10:33:34 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 10:33:34 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: Chuck McCrobie Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Opinion on File System Implementation In-Reply-To: <392E2096.FED6F59B@apl.jhu.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Chuck, Responding briefly as I'm currently on travel at a DARPA PI meeting and checking out shortly -- in 4.0-RELEASE/STABLE and 5.0-CURRENT, there is an interface for "extended attributes" on file system objects. Take a look at extattr(9), VOP_GETEXTATTR(9) and VOP_SETEXTATTR(9). There are exposed syscalls to userland also, but in 4.x they don't have man pages as there are no tools using them. In 5.0-CURRENT, I introduced rudimentary support for extended attributes in UFS/FFS to support security extensions I have been working on, so we also pushed in simple command line tools to allow userland to read/set/control extended attributes (setextattr(8), getextattr(8), extattrctl(8)). It may be that this interface is the appropriate interface to read, if not write, this meta-data. I believe that Boris Popov was looking at exposing NWFS attributes through this interface, as well as DOS file attributes that don't easily map to UNIX file permissions/mode. I believe that our current HPFS implementation uses an ioctl in the style that you describe, but it might be appropriate to modify it to use the extended attribute interface. It is my intent to commit syscall manpages for these interfaces over the next couple of weeks once I'm back from my trip. Robert N M Watson robert@fledge.watson.org http://www.watson.org/~robert/ PGP key fingerprint: AF B5 5F FF A6 4A 79 37 ED 5F 55 E9 58 04 6A B1 TIS Labs at Network Associates, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-fs" in the body of the message