Extended File Attributes

Extended File Attributes are very useful but will files in SAFE have capability to acknowledge user set attributes, in the way that many file systems can do?

The abc’s of this outlined here: http://www.linux-mag.com/id/8741/

In essence it’s a route to holding small amounts of date in a single file rather than spawning inodes and files for each data point.

In Linux, many file systems support it such as the following: ext2, ext3, ext4, jfs, xfs, reiserfs, btrfs, ocfs2 (2.1 and greater), and squashfs (kernel 2.6.35 and greater or a backport to an older kernel). Some of the file systems have restrictions on extended file attributes, such as the amount of data that can be added, but they do allow for the addition of user controlled metadata.

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user.comment and user.application look pretty useful. With the existing API I think this could be achieved with MD entries coupled with the NFS emulation.

They’re useful on traditional hard drives where you risk running short of inodes for the number of small files. Whether it would be so useful on SAFE where MD perhaps is an easy option, is not clear to me. Regardless though I wonder transition from traditional to SAFE should be made as hurdle free and trivial as possible. Also, if there’s additional cost involved in creating new files on SAFE, then perhaps that becomes a factor in some way similar to needing an inode on each new file; cheaper just to put the data relative to the one file.