On Mon, May 09, 2022 at 05:08:56PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote: [..] > Having "xattr" in the system call name is just confusing. These are > fundamentally not "real" xattrs and we shouldn't mix semantics. There > should be a clear distinction between traditional xattrs and this vfs > and potentially fs information providing interface. > > Just thinking about what the manpage would look like. We would need to > add a paragraph to xattr(7) explaining that in addition to the system.*, > security.*, user.* and other namespaces we now also have a set of > namespaces that function as ways to get information about mounts or > other things instead of information attached to specific inodes. > > That's super random imho. If I were to be presented with this manpage > I'd wonder if someone was too lazy to add a proper new system call with > it's own semantics for this and just stuffed it into an existing API > because it provided matching system call arguments. We can add a new > system call. It's not that we're running out of them. FWIW, I also felt that using xattr API to get some sort of mount info felt very non-intutive. Thanks Vivek
