Re: ext4 - getting at birth time (file create time) and getting/setting nanosecond time stamps and utime

[Steve French <smfrench@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 6:12 PM, Andreas Dilger <adilger@sun.com> wrote:
> On 19-Oct-09, at 16:24, Steve French wrote:
>> some of the performance benefit - path based could be slightly
>> slower (due to path revalidation, and access checks) than
>> handle based calls.
>>       int (*setxattr) (struct dentry *, const char *,const void
>> *,size_t,int);
>>       ssize_t (*getxattr) (struct dentry *, const char *, void *, size_t);
>>       ssize_t (*listxattr) (struct dentry *, char *, size_t);
>>       int (*removexattr) (struct dentry *, const char *);
>
> I'm not sure I understand your point.  sys_fgetxattr() maps directly to
> vfs_getxattr(), and while it still does permission checks, that doesn't
> have anything to do with pathname revalidation AFAICS.
>
> There are an equal number of permission checks in sys_fstat->vfs_getattr()
> as in sys_fgetxattr->vfs_getxattr().

Good point.  Looking more carefully I think you are right - the path
revalidation
is skipped in fgetxattr so it probably isn't much slower if at all (than
a handle based ioctl call would be).

>>> As for being able to write to the "create time" attribute, I would prefer
>>> that this be a filesystem mount option.  For some users (myself included)
>>> I don't care whether Windows is unhappy that it can't update this
>>> creation
>>> time - I'd prefer to know when a file is actually created.
> If this is a flag that a user can configure/select themselves, then it
> is completely useless to me.  If it is a mount option and/or possibly an
> additional process capability that would be more useful.

Yes ... there is a precedent for a process capability for something similar
(e.g. a Windows user must have both the "backup privilege" in his
process capability and specify a flag indicating he wants to
use "backup intent" for certain operations).   There are already
33 capabilities in include/linux/capability.h,  some as narrow as this.

-- 
Thanks,

Steve
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