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linux-next/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/eainode.rst
Darrick J. Wong 8a98ec7c7b docs: promote the ext4 data structures book to top level
Move the ext4 data structures book to Documentation/filesystems/ext4/
since the administrative information moved elsewhere.

Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
2018-10-05 19:20:08 -04:00

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.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
Large Extended Attribute Values
-------------------------------
To enable ext4 to store extended attribute values that do not fit in the
inode or in the single extended attribute block attached to an inode,
the EA\_INODE feature allows us to store the value in the data blocks of
a regular file inode. This “EA inode” is linked only from the extended
attribute name index and must not appear in a directory entry. The
inode's i\_atime field is used to store a checksum of the xattr value;
and i\_ctime/i\_version store a 64-bit reference count, which enables
sharing of large xattr values between multiple owning inodes. For
backward compatibility with older versions of this feature, the
i\_mtime/i\_generation *may* store a back-reference to the inode number
and i\_generation of the **one** owning inode (in cases where the EA
inode is not referenced by multiple inodes) to verify that the EA inode
is the correct one being accessed.