Incorporating a small change in inode structure: please help

[Stephen Smalley]

On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 16:44, Nifty Hat Mitch wrote:
> You might look at the mechanism that SELinux takes advantage of 
> extended attributes in the inode for your experiment.
> 
> For example ls has the flags -Z and --lcontext.
>     $ ls --lcontext /
>     total 339
>     drwxr-xr-x    6 system_u:object_r:default_t      root root   4096 Apr 10  2004 b
>     ....
> 
> By taking advandage of existing extended atributes you will not break
> the filesystem structure and the additional data is only
> important when your kernel changes inspect, check, and modify 
> your attribute.

Right, you likely don't need to add a field to the inode structure; you
can already associate arbitrary data with an inode via the existing
extended attribute support without requiring any changes to the kernel,
on-disk format, etc.  'man 5 attr'

-- 
Stephen Smalley <sds at epoch.ncsc.mil>
National Security Agency