Andreas Dilger adilger@dilger.ca wrote:
The idea was initially proposed as a set of xattrs that could be retrieved with getxattr(), but the general preferance proved to be for new syscalls with an extended stat structure.
I would comment that it was the opposite. It was originally a stat()-like extension that degraded into a messy getxattr() mess.
Ummm... No, my first attempt was definitely through getxattr(). You even commented on it.
The fields in struct xstat come in a number of classes:
(0) st_dev, st_blksize, st_information.
These are local data and are always available.For the extra two bits it would cost us, I don't think st_blksize and st_information should always be returned.
Fair enough.
st_blksize may be variable for a distributed filesystem,
I wonder if there's a way to make this explicit - or is it something that if the bit isn't set, you can't use the value in st_blksize. I wonder if this value always has to be non-zero to make sure existing stat() doesn't explode.
and some of the fields in st_information (offline) may not be free to access either.
True.
David