Message-ID: <3C59CE74.E5D20B9D@idcomm.com>
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 16:08:36 -0700
From: "D. Stimits" <stimits@idcomm.com>
Reply-To: stimits@idcomm.com
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To: "XFS: linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com" <linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com>
Subject: Re: [NEWS] Extended attributes interface changes
References: <20020201095217.F88469@wobbly.melbourne.sgi.com>
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Nathan Scott wrote:
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> As you may have heard, Linus has accepted the revised extended
> attributes interfaces which several projects have been working
> on during the past few months, including ours, into 2.5.3.
> 
> >From an XFS development point of view, this is great news and
> will result in a significant decrease in the overlap which the
> XFS patches have with the rest of the kernel, and also means
> that we will no longer need to use unreserved system calls.
> 
> Inclusion of XFS in certain distributions has been held up due
> to this, and once the transition to these interfaces is complete,
> I understand these will be able to proceed.  We will also be able
> to converge on a single set of user tools for EAs and POSIX ACLs
> that other filesystems will be using as well (which is good news
> for Samba and any other upstream libacl.so users).
> 
> >From an end-user point of view, we will need to make a transition
> from using our current system call interfaces for EAs and ACLs to
> the new interfaces.  This affects both the kernel and a number of
> the userspace tools and libraries.  We've considered attempting to

Do I read this correctly, it appears that only tools and kernels change,
current XFS filesystems themselves will remain unchanged for this
purpose, and fully compatible with newer tools and kernels?

D. Stimits, stimits@idcomm.com

> keep compatibility with the existing interfaces too, but ultimately
> have discarded that option and will instead make a clean break from
> one interface to the other (this applies to both the 2.4.x kernels
> and the 2.5.x kernels).  This means that with a future kernel merge
> we will also release new userspace packages (I expect to move all
> our packages up to version 2.0.0) and I also expect responsibility
> for the ACL package we use to be taken over by Andreas Gruenbacher
> - the author/maintainer of the [http://acl.bestbits.at/] ext2/ext3
> ACL implementation - at some point in the not-too-distant-future.
> 
> XFS 1.1 is scheduled for this quarter, I plan on having this all
> integrated for that release for those who track the official SGI
> releases rather than CVS or patches.
> 
> Further details will follow later, this is just a heads-up that a
> significant interface change is in the pipeline.
> 
> cheers.
> 
> --
> Nathan