[RFC PATCH] getting misc stats/attributes via xattr API

[Miklos Szeredi]

On Tue, 10 May 2022 at 16:19, Christian Brauner <brauner at kernel.org> wrote:

> Fwiw, turning this around: unifying semantically distinct interfaces
> because of syntactical similarities is bad. Moving them into a
> syntactically equivalent system call that expresses the difference in
> semantics in its name is good.

You are ignoring the arguments against fragmentation.

You are also ignoring the fact that semantically the current xattr
interface is already fragmented.   Grep for "strncmp(name, XATTR_" in
fs/xattr.c.

We don't have getsecurityxattr(), getuserxattr(), gettrustedxattr()
and getsystemxattr().  It would be crazy.   Adding getfsxattr()  would
be equally crazy.  getxattr() pretty much describes the semantics of
all of these things.

Thanks,
Miklos