On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 08:04:47PM -0800, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > On Sun, Feb 17, 2019 at 12:40:09PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote: > > So I'm highly in favor of this patch. If XFS wants to disallow > > writing the birth time, fine, but I think that behavior should be > > overridable. > > Please, no. We need to have consistent behaviour between at least > Linux local filesystems. Not "Chris thinks this is a good idea, > while Dave and Ted think its a bad idea, so btrfs supports it and > XFS and ext4 disallow it". And, quite frankly, this is the entire reason xattrs exist. i.e. so that generic file attributes can be stored persitently without each individual having to support them in their on-disk format. I wish people would stop trying to implement stuff like this in filesystem code and instead added it to the VFS and stored it in VFS defined system xattrs so that it is common across all filesystems. It also means that backup applications can preserve them during file copies without really even being aware of their meaning, simply by copying all the xattrs on the file... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx