From: Herbert Pötzl (herbert_at_13thfloor.at)
Date: Mon 18 Aug 2003 - 18:38:33 BST
Hi Everyone!
I'm glad to announce that Alex and I agreed upon
a quasi standard how to store context information
in filesystem inodes ...
What is your benefit?
- the binary filesystem data will be compatible
so changing from one implementation to the other
should work (at least regarding this information)
- testing and quality assurance should be improved
because we only have to verify one implementation
- tools will be available to read/modify/write this
on disk ctx data, hopefully also backup solutions
will be possible ...
Why should we do it at all?
- there are some reasons for 'tagging' an inode
with a 'context tag', like security issues or
statistical purposes, but the major reason is
a quota solution, which gives per vserver user
and group quota, as well as some kind of easily
configurable disk limit for each context on
shared partitions ...
What was agreed upon?
- there are three ways to store the 16bit context
information within a on disk inode structure
namely UID32/GID32, UID32/GID16, and UID24/GID24
- UID32/GID32 or EXTERNAL format uses, up to now
unused space within the disk inode to store the
context information, this is currently only
defined for ext2/ext3 but will be also defined
for xfs, reiserfs, and jfs as soon as possible.
you'll have full 32bit uid/gid values here ...
- UID32/GID16 (works on all 32bit U/GID FSs)
this format uses the upper half of the group id
to store the context information. this is done
transparently, so you'll never notice, except if
you change the format without file conversion.
it also means that you only have 16bits for gid
so a maximum of 65536 groups ...
- UID24/GID24 (works on all 32bit U/GID FSs)
the format uses the upper quarter of user and
group id to store the context information, again
transparently. you'll end up with 16 million
user and group ids, which should suffice for the
majority of applications ...
- but most important, the format you choose will
have no influence on the features provided by
the patches, so it's your preference ...
enjoy,
Herbert