[Labeled-nfs] Current development prototype patches.

[Peter Staubach]

Casey Schaufler wrote:
> --- Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust at fys.uio.no> wrote:
>
>   
>> On Sat, 2007-08-04 at 19:51 +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>     
>>> On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 11:38:06AM -0700, Casey Schaufler wrote:
>>>       
>>>> I agree. EAs over NFS are not very hard. Have you seen the SGI published
>>>> xattr extension? It's not large or particularly complex, and it has 
>>>> about 10 years exposure in the Unix environment.
>>>>         
>>> It's extremly nice.  And SGI even released the xdr en/decoding files
>>> under GPL a while ago.  A lot nicer than either the SUN NFSv3 ACL
>>> extensions or the whole subfile bullshit added to NFSv4.
>>>       
>> Ugh. Yet another RPC sideband protocol?
>>     
>
> Your point being?

I think that the point is that sideband protocols unnecessarily
complicate the architecture.  They make deployment complex because
they usually tend to run over separate transport protocol streams.
They also tend to share fundamental elements with other protocols,
thus creating dependencies which are never explicit.  The lack of
these explicit dependencies tends to mean that the implementation
of these protocols require the blending of implementations,
something that we try to avoid doing by introducing interfaces.

By combining all of the required features into one, rich protocol,
these dependencies become explicit, the implementation can
be made simpler, and deployment becomes more straightforward.

There are a lot of things about NFSv4 which I don't like, but
combining the various functionalities into one entity isn't one
of them.

We can keep on pretending that the various facets of file systems
can be treated separately, but when one gets down to the nitty-
gritty details, they aren't anymore.

       ps