Hello As far as I understand, here is the status of extended attributes on NetBSD:
- available on NetBSD-current on UFS1 filesystems. One has to build a kernel with options UFS_EXTATTR and UFS_EXTATTR_AUTOSTART, and any attribute you want to use needs a backend. extattrctl initattr and extattrctl enable are used to create the backends. - available on netbsd-5 with the same limitation as NetBSD-current, plus pullup 1624 that needs to be applied otherwise it is unusable. - not available on any NetBSD version with UFS2 filesystems. In a nutshell, the only way to go on NetBSD is UFS1 and you need to create attribute backends. I would like to make this more usable by removing the backend creation requirement. It seems that we could add a create flag to src/sys/ufs/ufs/ufs_extattr.c:ufs_extattr_find_attr() so that ufs_extattr_set() coould have the opportunity to request attribute storage creation. Such a behavior could be triggered by a new kernel option such as UFS_EXTATTR_AUTOCREATE. It could hold the default size for autocreated attributes. (e.g.: options UFS_EXTATTR_AUTOCREATE=1024 to get 1024 bytes long attributes). Opinions? -- Emmanuel Dreyfus m...@netbsd.org
