Tool to access ZFS/NFSv4 alternate data streams on FreeBSD?

[Rick Macklem]

Jordan Hubbard wrote:
> Yep.  I was just describing the experience that OS X went through in
> implementing extattrs / legacy resource fork support.  To recap it
> very briefly:  Having NFSv4 support extattrs (or even named streams,
> if you want to go that far) is the comparatively easy part.  It’s
> backing them up / copying them around that gets more involved, and
> if you can’t back up certain attributes then you’re not likely to
> get anyone to want to use them, at which point the whole “sharing”
> aspect kind of takes a back seat.
> 
Yep. I strongly suspect you are correct.

The question then becomes:
- Do we wait and see if someone chooses to get around to doing all
  the hard userland work.
or
- Do the easy part in the kernel and then hope someone does the
  hard userland work because they need it.
or
- Just decide that the Linux style extended attributes are adequate
  and not do resource forks at all?

If the "collective" does decide to support resource forks,
I don't think there is a need to have these supported by all file system types
in FreeBSD. For example for NFSv4 ACLs, they are implemented on UFS
and ZFS and I haven't seen expressions of a need for them to be
supported by other file system types. I also think that users could
live with "if you need resource forks, you have to use ZFS".

Btw, personally, I couldn't care less if these are implemented.
However, if seems that the kernel part is easy to do and might be
useful for folk looking for an alternative to Solaris.

Now I'm going to go out on a big limb (flame suit on as we used to say;-)
and suggest that Oracle/Solaris will be a dying beast that many users
will be looking for an alternative to. Having FreeBSD be a useful alternative
might be a good direction for FreeBSD to go.

rick

> On Sep 8, 2014, at 4:10 PM, Rick Macklem <rmacklem at uoguelph.ca>
> wrote:
> 
> > Last time this came up for discussion, Jordan Hubbard got quite
> > involved
> > along the lines of ``most of the work is in userland, for archive
> > tools, etc``.
> > I can`t remember what the mailing list thread was called, but it
> > was started
> > by a guy who was a ``resource fork`` advocate (associated with CERN
> > if I recall),
> > where they use Gbyte extended attributes.
> 
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