This is one of the items in the plumber's wish list.
For use cases:
>> What would the use case be for this?
>
> Attaching meta information to services, in an easily discoverable
> way. For example, in systemd we create one cgroup for each service, and
> could then store data like the main pid of the specific service as an
> xattr on the cgroup itself. That way we'd have almost all service state
> in the cgroupfs, which would make it possible to terminate systemd and
> later restart it without losing any state information. But there's more:
> for example, some very peculiar services cannot be terminated on
> shutdown (i.e. fakeraid DM stuff) and it would be really nice if the
> services in question could just mark that on their cgroup, by setting an
> xattr. On the more desktopy side of things there are other
> possibilities: for example there are plans defining what an application
> is along the lines of a cgroup (i.e. an app being a collection of
> processes). With xattrs one could then attach an icon or human readable
> program name on the cgroup.
>
> The key idea is that this would allow attaching runtime meta information
> to cgroups and everything they model (services, apps, vms), that doesn't
> need any complex userspace infrastructure, has good access control
> (i.e. because the file system enforces that anyway, and there's the
> "trusted." xattr namespace), notifications (inotify), and can easily be
> shared among applications.
>
> Lennart
v7:
- no changes
v6:
- remove user xattr namespace, only allow trusted and security
v5:
- check for capabilities before setting/removing xattrs
v4:
- no changes
v3:
- instead of config option, use mount option to enable xattr support
Original-patch-by: Li Zefan <lizefan@huawei.com>
Cc: Li Zefan <lizefan@huawei.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Hillf Danton <dhillf@gmail.com>
Cc: Lennart Poettering <lpoetter@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Li Zefan <lizefan@huawei.com>
Signed-off-by: Aristeu Rozanski <aris@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
03b1cde6b2