Re: [RFC PATCH 00/35] user xattr support (RFC8276)

J. Bruce Fields
2019-11-04T03:01:33Z

On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 03:55:09PM -0400, Chuck Lever wrote:
> > On Oct 24, 2019, at 7:15 PM, Frank van der Linden <fllinden@amazon.com> wrote:
> > I think both of these are cases of being careful. E.g. don't enable
> > something by default and allow it to be disabled at runtime in
> > case something goes terribly wrong.
> >
> > I didn't have any other reasons, really. I'm happy do to away with
> > the CONFIG options if that's the consensus, as well as the
> > nouser_xattr export option.
>
> I have similar patches adding support for access to a couple of
> security xattrs. I initially wrapped the new code with CONFIG
> but after some discussion it was decided there was really no
> need to be so cautious.
>
> The user_xattr export option is a separate matter, but again,
> if we don't know of a use case for it, I would leave it out for
> the moment.

Agreed.

Do ext4, xfs, etc. have an option to turn off xattrs? If so, maybe it
would be good enough to turn off xattrs on the exported filesystem
rathre than on the export.

If not, maybe that's a sign that hasn't been a need.

--b.