Re: [RFC v2] Unicode/UTF-8 support for XFS

Ben Myers
2014-09-26T17:30:15Z

Hey Christoph,

On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 09:56:05AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 04:50:39PM +0200, Olaf Weber wrote:
> > >It's a chicken and egg situation. I'd much prefer we enforce clean
> > >utf8 from the start, because if we don't we'll never be able to do
> > >that. And other filesystems (e.g. ZFS) allow you to do reject
> > >anything that is not clean utf8....
> >
> > As I understand it, this is optional in ZFS. I wonder what people's
> > experiences are with this.
>
> It is as optional as your utf8 support for XFS is. But they do
> enforce valid utf8 if they use utf8 normalization for file name
> comparisms, be that case sensitive or insensitive. Take a look at the
> zfs(8) man page.

The way I'm reading that man page, it seems like with ZFS you have one
option to choose whether to use normalization:

'nomalization = "none|FormD|FormKCf"'

And a separate option to choose whether to accept non-utf8 filenames:

'utf8only = "on|off".

The default setting appears to be that ZFS does allow non-utf8
filenames.

Whereas with Olaf's series you have one option that turns normalization
on or off, and he is not giving you a choice of whether non-utf8
filenames will be accepted (they will be accepted).

So IIUC there is a distinction: The utf8 support for ZFS is "more
optional" than the utf8 support for XFS.

Regards,
Ben