On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 12:17:22AM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > Furthermore, it would require extra complexity in the common fsverity code > --- which looks for the Merkle tree at the end of file data --- for no real > benefit. To clarify, while this is technically true currently, as I mentioned it's been kept flexible enough such that a filesystem *could* store the metadata elsewhere with only some slight changes to the common fs/verity/ code which won't break other filesystems. Though of course, keeping all filesystems using the "metadata after EOF" approach does allow a couple simplifications. - Eric