Re: dreaddir/fxattr

[Andreas Schwab <schwab@issan.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>]

Julian Reschke <reschke@GOEDEL.UNI-MUENSTER.DE> writes:

|> Below is a first draft:
|> Proposal for a combined call for Dreaddir/Fxattr:

|> LONG Dreadattr( WORD len, LONG dirhandle, char *buf, WORD lflag, XATTR *xattr);

|> len, dirhandle and buf are just like in Dreaddir. lflag and xattr
|> are the standard parameters for Fxattr.

I don't think this is needed. Look at the latest version of GNU find.
It makes many optimizations regarding the need to stat() a file.
E.g., when running on a directory with no subdirectories, and you only
need the names of the files, it doesn't make any stat() calls. Such
optimizations will give you more than a new system call, which is also
difficult to bind into the existing dirent interface. (Of course, the
optimizations are only possible on MinixFS, where you have real link
counts for directories.)

If you can fix it by software, why changing the kernel? :)

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andreas Schwab                                  "And now for something
schwab@ls5.informatik.uni-dortmund.de            completely different"