FAT, NTFS, CIFS and DOS attributes - fa.linux.kernel

Message from discussion FAT, NTFS, CIFS and DOS attributes

H. Peter Anvin

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More options Jan 3 2005, 5:46 pm

Newsgroups: fa.linux.kernel

From: "H. Peter Anvin" <h...@zytor.com>

Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 22:46:09 GMT

Local: Mon, Jan 3 2005 5:46 pm

Subject: FAT, NTFS, CIFS and DOS attributes

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Hello all,

I recently posted to LKML a patch to get or set DOS attribute flags for
fatfs. That patch used ioctl(). It was suggested that a better way
would be using xattrs, although the xattr mechanism seems clumsy to me,
and has namespace issues.

I also think it would be good to have a unified interface for FAT, NTFS
and CIFS for these attributes.

I noticed that CIFS has a placeholder "user.DosAttrib" in cifs/xattr.c,
although it doesn't seem to be implemented.

Questions:

a) is xattr the right thing? It seems to be a fairly complex and
ill-thought-out mechanism all along, especially the whole namespace
business (what is a system attribute to one filesystem is a user
attribute to another, for example.)

b) if xattr is the right thing, shouldn't this be in the system
namespace rather than the user namespace?

c) What should the representation be? Binary byte? String containing a
subset of "rhsvda67" (barf)?

-hpa
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