# Re: \[PATCH 2/2\] afs: Add metadata xattrs

- From: Jeffrey Altman \<hidden\>
- Date: 2017-07-09 02:45:58 
- List: linux-api
- Page: https://ratatoskr.run/linux-api/2017/07/124400
- Thread: https://ratatoskr.run/linux-fsdevel/2017/07/124036/t.md

```text
On 7/8/2017 9:01 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 08, 2017 at 12:44:54PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> Yeah, I think attributes are likely much better than some random crazy
>> ioctl interface. They can be listed with generic tools, and have
>> various scripting interfaces in ways that ioctl's do not sanely have.
> 
> I personally don't have a particular problem with these xattrs.  For
> one thing, they are read-only.  You use them just to find out the AFS
> cell, the AFS "fid", and the AFS volume name.
> 
> I think the place where people will start getting nervous is when we
> start adding "write-only" xattrs or where writing to an xattr causes a
> side-effect to take place.

Ted,

The list of AFS pioctls and the proposed alternatives for kAFS are
listed at

  https://www.infradead.org/~dhowells/kafs/user_interface.html

While it is true that the majority of the proposed xattrs are read-only
properties of AFS objects (cell, volume, fid, servers, sec_class,
sec_mode) there is one exception that is read-write (acls).  AuriStorFS
permits acls to be set per-file; there was some per-file acl work begun
for OpenAFS but it was never completed.

Is there an alternative for fetching and setting ACLs that should be
considered?

Jeffrey Altman




```

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