Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH] get/set FAT filesystem attribute bits | From | Nicholas Miell <> | Date | Tue, 04 Jan 2005 13:45:37 -0800 |
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On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 10:09 +0000, Anton Altaparmakov wrote: > > Nicholas Miell wrote: > > > On another note, NTFS-style xattrs (aka named streams) are unrelated to > > > Linux xattrs. A named stream is a separate file with a funny name, while > > > a Linux xattr is a named extension to struct stat. > > This is incorrect. NTFS has two different beasts: > [ why this is incorrect omitted for brevity ] > > One interesting bit of trivia is that Windows uses named streams very > extensively while it _never_ uses EAs. In fact I have never seen a > Windows OS or application that uses EAs. They were added to be > compatible with OS/2 EAs when it came out but since OS/2 died they now > just seem like old baggage/backwards compatibility in Windows that is no > longer used. (If anyone knows of a Windows application that uses EAs > please let me know. I would be most interested in knowing about it!) >
This would probably explain why I've never heard of them. In my brief perusal of the MSDN Library in search of more information about these beasts, the only hint I could find related to their existence is in parameters to ZwCreateFile/NtCreateFile (which are themselves mostly undocumented). The high level file API certainly doesn't support their use, AFAICT.
I think it's reasonably safe to assume that hpa's worry that FAT might get EAs in the future is unfounded. (Named streams is still a possibility, but I don't think Microsoft is all that interested in making improvements to a filesystem that people use so that they don't have to license NTFS.)
> Hope this clears things up a bit as far as NTFS is concerned... > > I don't know what API would be best for accessing named streams on NTFS > but an xattrs like interface is not suitable IMO. You really want to be > able to open them and access them like normal files. An interface > similar to the Solaris openat() system call (see > http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-0212/6m6nd4nc7?a=view) that has > been discussed on LKML before seems like a good way to deal with this > but I am more interested in getting normal write support into NTFS at > present than I am in fancy features like EAs and named streams... >
Good luck with that.
> Best regards, > > Anton -- Nicholas Miell <nmiell@comcast.net>
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