[PATCH] vfs_streams_xattr: Do not attempt to write empty attributetwice

[Richard Sharpe]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Christof Schmitt
<christof.schmitt at us.ibm.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 06:15:50AM -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
>> For my part the change looks correct.
>
> Good.
>
>> However, the issue I have with storing streams in XATTRs is that each
>> stream should act like a real file. That means that you could write
>> one sector to offset 0 and another sector to offset 512. That semantic
>> is hard to handle with XATTRs and the module the way it is.
>
> Yes, that is a general limitation of this approach. The size of
> streams is also limited by the size of xattrs on the underlying
> filesystems. I am testing this approach to find out if it would be
> sufficient for the small streams created by Windows clients like
> favicon, zoneidentifier, etc.
>
> The advantage of this approach is that the xattrs are tied to the file.
> Even when the file is deleted directly on the filesystem, there is no
> dangling streams file like in the streams_depot approach.

Yes, this last advantage is very useful. With the depot approach there
seems to be no way to identify which file the stream is associated
with.

-- 
Regards,
Richard Sharpe
(何以解憂？唯有杜康。--曹操)