No, I'm not familiar with this. I was trying to frame my questions strictly in terms of Reiser4 naming constructs (the '/' operator only).
Do the extended attributes show up as file system paths? Or is there a separate API to access them? If they show up as paths then I think they are very loosely like what I'm talking about: a shorthand syntax that by convention disabiguates similiar names.
Thanks for the reference, I'll look into this when time permits.
John
Grant Miner wrote:
Are you familiar with the extended attribute name space? An extended attribute name has the form of namespace.attribute, eg. user.mime-type, trusted.md5sum, or system.posix_acl_access. Currently the user, trusted, and system extended attribute classes are defined; more may be defined in the future.
User attributes may be assigned to files and directories for storing arbitrary additional information such as the mime type, character set or encoding of a file. The access permissions for user attributes are defined by the file permission bits.
Trusted attributes are visible and accessible only to processes that have the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability (the super user usually has this capability). Attributes in this class are used to implement mechanisms in user space (i.e., outside the kernel) which keep information in extended attributes to which ordinary processes should not have access.
System attributes are used by the kernel to store system objects such as Access Control Lists and Capabilities. Read and write access permissions to system attributes depend on the policy implemented for each system attribute implemented in the kernel.
