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