From:	"Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@redhat.com>
Date:	Tue, 29 Jun 1999 00:10:37 +0100 (BST)
To:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] File flags handling - proposal for API.

Hi,

On Fri, 25 Jun 1999 09:26:13 -0700 (PDT), Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@transmeta.com> said:

> I've long wanted to have "flags" system calls, because I hate ioctl's with
> a passion. However, nobody was bothered enough by it to actually implement
> it..

Yes, somebody did.  I distributed that as part of my old raw IO
patches, and will fold it into 2.3 if you like.  

> 	{l,f,}chflags({name,fd,name}, u32 *old, u32 *new);

> and then you can read and write the flags with just one system call. I do
> not want to extend on stat() yet again.

Exactly: it defined

+asmlinkage int sys_fsattr(const char * filename, unsigned int len,
+			  const char *in, char *out)

which also allows the vector of flag bits to grow beyond 4 bytes in the
future.  It mapped all of the ext3 attributes correctly to the portable
ATTR_FLAG_* definitions and allowed attributes to be set on device files
(which was the whole reason for it at the time).  The only thing missing
was the lfsattr variant.

--Stephen




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