Usefulness of extended attributes over NFS

[James Morris]

I've been working on an implementation of extended attributes for NFSv3, 
which would enable getxattr(2) and friends over the network.

Here's a link to the latest patchset:
http://lwn.net/Articles/392944/

and my LinuxCon slides on the topic from last year:
http://namei.org/presentations/linuxcon09_nfsv3xattrs.pdf

I've been asked by the upstream NFS maintainers about general use-cases 
for this feature.  We have a concrete requirement to convey security
labels over NFS, although it's not clear how much need there is for 
user-managed extended attributes (e.g. user.foo)

I was wondering if anyone could offer examples or insights into whether 
Linux desktop apps are making much use of extended attributes, or whether 
they might if NFS support were available.  (I'm aware of Beagle, which is 
probably not great over NFS in any case).

Thanks for any help.


- James
-- 
James Morris
<jmorris at namei.org>