[openbeos] Re: Attribute support on foreign OS (was Re: Storage Kit)
- From: "Alexander G. M. Smith" <agmsmith@xxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 04 Nov 2001 11:08:16 EST
> The problem is Linux doesn't support attributes _at the VFS layer_.
> So we could add attribute support on say XFS, how would we tell the
> XFS to read an attribute from foo.txt since we must speak to the
> VFS which doesn't know what an attribute is ?
> 2 solutions I see for that:
> - patch the Linux VFS to add attribute support: well, dunno if
> Linus will like it. -> Depends on Linux maintainers.
> - use something I myself never really have used in coding, the
> IOCTL call. the IOCTL is there to "perform a variety of control
> functions on devices and STREAMS".
My idea of a quick and dirty yet effective hack would be a dummy
file system which supports attributes and other frills as extra
files in a real file system. Much like the *.info files attached
to Amiga files to contain the icon and parameters. Querying
attributes and the other extra operations would be done through
Ioctl operations, and yes, we'd need a standard set of opcodes
for those operations.
The runtime library would have stub functions that map BeOS
style API calls into the appropriate Ioctl operations. So,
not much would change for user level programmers, just the
addition of a BeOS compatability library.
- Alex
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