2009/387 [Pathname Reparse Points]

[Afshin Salek]

> 
> I actually wonder if a different approach to this would be better -- say 
> a per-filesystem tunable that enables parsing of symbolic links, then a 
> simple -- *short* -- magic token that activates it.  Say @@ or 
> somesuch.  (Simpler is better here.)   The filesystem tunable would be 
> available for administrators that don't want to use referrals, and have 
> @@  (or whatever the magic token is) references already in their 
> filesystems...
> 

The reason we proposed the one bit extensible attribute is that
consumers like CIFS and NFS could quickly determine whether or not
a symlink is a reparse point without having to look at the content.
This is, as explained in the case, can be done by a single VOP_LOOKUP.

Afshin