[snip]
If you have persistent xattr support we need the dentry since the xattr code requires a dentry. I have no idea why but that's what inode->i_op->getxattr() requires.
The original reason that the xattr operations take dentries is because of p9fs and CIFS. CIFS uses the name of the file to grab the extended attributes and so does p9fs. I had tried to remove this a while ago but couldn't find a way around that. When trying to find a solution I also got push back from Miklos (FUSE) as he views a filesystem being able to make xattr decisions based on the path name being a valid use-case.
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