[HEADS-UP] Using stored immutable file birth time for SMB File-ID

[Christof Schmitt]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 08:08:37PM +0200, Ralph Boehme via samba-technical wrote:
> On 6/26/19 7:59 PM, Ralph Boehme via samba-technical wrote:
> > On 6/26/19 6:12 PM, David Disseldorp wrote:
> >> - given that this issue is Apple client specific, is there a need for
> >>   this new logic to be implemented outside of vfs_fruit?
> > 
> > yes, I think our current semantics based on inodes is dumb and we need a
> > general fix.
> 
> an additional note: from an implementation perspective it would be ideal
> to store the additional state in an existing xattr, instead of an
> additional one.
> 
> We need to fetch the state for directory enumerations and getxattr can
> be slow, especially with fuse based filesytems which many of our
> consumers love these days. So piggypacking this onto the existing DOS
> xattr seemed like a clever idea.

Have you considered file systems that store the birthtime in metadata
(no xattr)? It sounds like for that case we would need to add a new
xattr for the new metadata. I guess we have to pay for this somewhere...

Christof