On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 05:39:16PM +0000, Frank van der Linden wrote: > On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 12:53:47PM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote: > > CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you can confirm the sender and know the content is safe. > > > > By the way, I can't remember if I asked this before: is there a > > particular use case that motivates this xattr work? > > There's one use case that I can't really talk about publicly at this point > (and it's not my code either, so I wouldn't have all the details). Nothing > super secret or anything - it's just something that is not mine, > so I won't try to speak for anyone. We wanted to get this upstreamed first, > as that's the right thing to do. > > Since I posted my first RFC, I did get contacted off-list by several > readers of linux-nfs who wanted to use the feature in practice, too, so > there's definitely interest out there. Yeah, I always hear a lot of interest but then have trouble sorting through it for the cases that are actually *user* xattr cases, where the server has to just act as a dumb store of the values. There are some. But unfortunately xattrs are best known for enabling selinux and posix acls, and to a lesser extent accessing random other filesystem features, so that tends to be what comes to people's minds first, though it's not what we're doing. --b.
