On 2012-04-19, at 8:06 AM, David Howells wrote: > Add a pair of system calls to make extended file stats available, > including file creation time, inode version and data version where available through the underlying filesystem. > > The idea was initially proposed as a set of xattrs that could be > retrieved with getxattr(), but the general preferance proved to be > for new syscalls with an extended stat structure. I would comment that it was the opposite. It was originally a stat()-like extension that degraded into a messy getxattr() mess. > (2) Lightweight stat: Ask for just those details of interest, and > allow a netfs (such as NFS) to approximate anything not of > interest, possibly without going to the server [Trond Myklebust, > Ulrich Drepper]. This was my original motivation for this functionality, so you can put my name here also. > The fields in struct xstat come in a number of classes: > > (0) st_dev, st_blksize, st_information. > > These are local data and are always available. For the extra two bits it would cost us, I don't think st_blksize and st_information should always be returned. st_blksize may be variable for a distributed filesystem, and some of the fields in st_information (offline) may not be free to access either. Cheers, Andreas -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html