Re: [RFC] Directly mapped xattr data & fs-verity

Christoph Hellwig
2025-01-06T15:42:17Z

I've not looked in details through the entire series, but I still find
all the churn for trying to force fsverity into xattrs very counter
productive, or in fact wrong.

xattrs are for relatively small variable sized items where each item
has it's own name. fsverity has been designed to be stored beyond
i_size inside the file. We're creating a lot of overhead for trying
to map fsverity to an underlying storage concept that does not fit it
will. As fsverity protected files can't be written to there is no
chance of confusing fsverity blocks with post-EOF preallocation.

So please try to implement it just using the normal post-i_size blocks
and everything will become a lot simpler and cleaner even if the concept
of metadata beyond EOF might sound revolting (it still does to me to
some extent)