Re: [PATCH] Extended attribute fixes, etc.

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Saturday 15 February 2003 12:07, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 08:18:58PM +0100, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> > The third to fifth are all steps towards trusted extended
> > attributes, which are useful for privileged processes (mostly
> > daemons). One use for this is Hierarchical Storage Management, in
> > which a user space daemon stores online/offline information for
> > files in trusted EA's, and the kernel communicates requests to
> > bring files online to that daemon. This class of EA's will also
> > find its way into XFS and ReiserFS, and expectedly also into JFS in
> > this form. (Trusted EAs are included in the 2.4.19/2.4.20 patches
> > as well.)
>
> Please don't do the ugly flags stuff.  We have fsuids and fsgids for
> exactly that reason (and because we're still lacking a credentials
> cache..).

The XATTR_KERNEL_CONTEXT flag cannot be substituted by a uid/gid change; 
it is unrelated to that; that's the whole point of it. It would be 
possible to raise some other flag (such as a capability, etc.) instead 
of passing an explicit flag, but that seems uglier and more 
problematic/error prone to me.

-- Andreas.