> > I actually wonder if a different approach to this would be better -- say > a per-filesystem tunable that enables parsing of symbolic links, then a > simple -- *short* -- magic token that activates it. Say @@ or > somesuch. (Simpler is better here.) The filesystem tunable would be > available for administrators that don't want to use referrals, and have > @@ (or whatever the magic token is) references already in their > filesystems... >
The reason we proposed the one bit extensible attribute is that consumers like CIFS and NFS could quickly determine whether or not a symlink is a reparse point without having to look at the content. This is, as explained in the case, can be done by a single VOP_LOOKUP. Afshin
