[Cluster-devel] [RFC 09/11] vfs: Add igetxattr inode operation

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 08:19:56PM +0200, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> Add an igetxattr inode operation that behaves as getxattr but operates on
> inodes instead of dentries.  File systems that support this operation can
> implement igetxattr for reading xattrs in contexts where a dentry is not
> available, such as within SELinux inode security checks.

And this is even worse - we should not have two operations doing the
same thing.