Re: named streams, extended attributes, and posix

Michael Rothwell
2001-01-19T15:11:50Z

Mo McKinlay wrote:

> openstream(file, stream, flags)
>
> Where 'file' should be an fd (although i'm sure the VFS gods will think of
> plenty of reasons why this is a bad idea, at which point I'll
> conventiently change my mind ;). Stream is simply the name of the stream,
> flags are as with open() (O_RDONLY, et al). openstream() then returns an
> fd which can be read/written/sendfiled/closed as the programmer wishes.

I'm not opposed to that, and think it is even a useful idea. Sort of
like fdopen().

> Apart from the additional of a new open()-type call, your paper seems to
> be fairly solid.

Thanks. I think having the option of the namespace augmentation would be
useful, in terms of supporting existing filesystems. On NTFS, ":" is not
a legal filename character anyway. The namespace augmentation suggested
in the paper would allow filesystems like NTFS to work as they should,
and all other filesystems to ignore it.

-M