Chapter 4. XFS Practical Exercises - 04 - Extended Attributes
Extended Attributes (EA's) are used for attaching structured meta information to a file or inode and below we will give an example using an ACL. In the lab we will look at how we store an ACL in an EA and how this EA can be stored in various forms on the disk in XFS. Finally, we will look at how the EA's compete for inode space with the data extents and how variable this can be when attr2 is turned on for an XFS filesystem.
To understand what EA's are in XFS
The interfaces to manipulate EA's
Summary of the ondisk formats
The competition for inode space between data extents and EA extents
Becoming more familiar with xfs_db(8) for looking at inodes
Some knowledge of what Extended Attributes (EA's) and Access Control Lists (ACL's) are would be beneficial.
Need a scratch filesystem to play with as root
In the examples we will refer to this device and mount point through these environment variables, for example:
export SCRATCH_MNT=/mnt/scratch
export SCRATCH_DEV=/dev/sda8
acl and attr packages installed
xfsprogs package installed
xfstests/src/makeextents binary; the directory path for this is called $BINDIR
export BINDIR=/home/fred/src/xfs-cmds/xfstests/src
