Re: The Ext3sj Filesystem

["Matthew J. Fanto" <mattf@mattjf.com>]

On Thursday 31 October 2002 11:41 pm, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> First of all, have you considered trying to do this as a stacking
> filesystem?  

Yes, I spoke to Christoph Hellwig the other day and he suggested the same 
thing. I will be taking a look at a stacking filesystem tonight/tomorrow. 

> Secondly, the really critical question is key management.  What
> happens if the user gets the key wrong?  Will he/she know?  Or will
> they just get garbage if the read from the file, and be able to trash
> the file if they write to the file with the incorrect key?  Using some
> kind of key-ID and some way of validating that the key is correct
> before the user does start accessing files would probably be a really
> good idea.

It wouldn't be very hard to alert the user of an incorrect key using a message 
digest (SHA1). So far, I haven't implemented this feature, but I will if 
enough people want it.

> Finally, if you do want to allocate some additional fields in the ext2
> inode, superblock, etc., please coordinate with me, so we can avoid
> conflicts as much as possible.  Thanks!!

Yes, there will be a need for additional fields specifying things such as the 
algorithm to use.