Storing GUIDs in linux [filesystems]
Hi, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_unique_identifier is one way to uniquely identify users. It is used by Windows and Active Directory too. The size of a GUID is 128 bits. I want to store the GUID of an user on my experimental filesystem. The size of the "uid" in UNIX is just 16 bits. So what is the way used by the Linux [filesystems] to store the GUID in linux to uniquely identify an user ? Were there any proposals in the past, to increase the size of the unix uid to match that of a GUID ? -- Sankar P http://psankar.blogspot.com
On Thu, 27 Mar 2014 16:55:53 +0530, Sankar P said:
The size of the "uid" in UNIX is just 16 bits. So what is the way used by the Linux [filesystems] to store the GUID in linux to uniquely identify an user ?
The filesystem only stores UIDs, not GUIDS for users.
Were there any proposals in the past, to increase the size of the unix uid to match that of a GUID ?
There's been proposals. They usually end up dying off because the person making the proposal can't make the business case. What *actual* benefits do we get from doing this? Wnat problem does it solve that (for instance) aren't solved just as well by doing uid-guid mapping in the nfsd or cifs code as things go out on the wire? How do we do conversion of all the existing filesystems that only store 32-bit values? What's the performance impact of having to do 128-bit comparisons rather than 32-bit?
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Sankar P -
Valdis.Kletnieks＠vt.edu