Re: extended attributes

[Steven Bellovin <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Jun 10, 2011, at 3:20 58AM, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 01:33:46PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
>> I don't love having an option for this.  Is there a space or performance
>> issue with making it (or extended attribute support in general!) the
>> default?
> 
> I potential problem: extended attribute autostart on the root filesystem
> with a corrupted filesystem easily leads to a panic at mount time. This
> cannot be recovered through single user mode. I suggest that if we make
> extended attribute the default, we disabled autostart in single user 
> mode.

How would it be turned on when you go multi-user?  I don't like
assuming that people will remember to do that.

> Alternatively, we can always disable autostart on the root, and have
> a rc.d script enabling it later during the boot (after fsck).
> 
Probably a better idea, though either path means that files created
when single-user don't have any attributes, nor can they be set or checked.


                --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb