create time format in EAs

[Jeremy Allison]

On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 02:36:14AM +0100, Björn JACKE wrote:
> 
> there are already Unix systems supporting creation timestamps. No matter what
> the semantics are and whether they are immutable or not - they will probably
> all have ns resolution.

Yes, and we'll map into them to/from the wire format.

> > Right now the only way to get at the create time via UNIX extensions
> > returns NTTIME semantics, so even though the underlying birth
> > time stored on a filesystem might be in ns, there's no way to
> > return that.
> 
> that's how it is today. Tomorrow we might see cifs unix extensions to support
> full ns resolution timestamps, something like that was already proposed on the
> lists I think. That's what I have in mind when I suggest to use the highest
> time resolution we might want to support in the future.

If we have cifs unix extensions with their own custom ns on the
wire time format, then they'll map directly into the ns creation
times we read from the filesystem. The EA we store is for Windows
timestamps with Windows semantics, and I think we should keep it
in that format.

I don't see the problem you're trying to solve by changing
the xattr format ?

Jeremy.