Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 13 Aug 2000 13:42:04 -0400 | From | Michael Rothwell <> | Subject | Re: NTFS-like streams? |
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Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Note that some NTFS people have advocated the NTFS design: special > functions for setting and accessing the NTFS EA's. And that is _equally_ > short-sighted. It misses the point entirely: I'm not interested in a > HFS-specific hack, and I'm not interested in a NTFS-specific hack.
While I'm not neccissarily an "NTFS person," I feel compelled to point out that NTFS named streams operate as normal files, and are accessed via a namespace extension, the ":" character. BeFS, HPFS, etc. Extended Attributes can be built on top of NTFS-style Named Streams by providing accessor functions that simply opening a stream, writing a chunk of data to it, and closing it again. NTFS is the only FS, AFAIK, that supports such a generic view of streams. BeFS, the Mac, etc. all use Extended Attributes available as name-value pairs only via special functions.
I am also not interested in a filesystem-specific hack. It just seems that the NTFS method of making streams usable by open(), read(), write(), seek(), etc. makes sense as a foundation for all types of EAs. You could even mmap() streams for the benefit of the accessor functions.
-Michael
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