• exu
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    319 months ago

    Cool. Does ACL support also depend on the filesystem?

    • @tal
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      329 months ago

      Yeah, but I think all reasonably-modern Unixy filesystems on Linux will support ACLs. ext2/3/4, btrfs, xfs, zfs, jfs, etc.

    • 520
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      129 months ago

      Yes. Some filesystems straight up do not support ACL of any kind (eg: fat32)

      • @velovix@hedge.town
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        109 months ago

        Fat32 doesn’t support regular file permissions either, right? I was under the impression that it was permissionless.

        • 520
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          49 months ago

          You are entirely correct, it has no permission system to speak of

        • zero_iq
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          9 months ago

          Sorry, but this is completely wrong.

          Windows has ACLs and they are an important part of Windows administration, and used extensively for managing file permissions.

          Windows has supported ACLs on NTFS since Windows NT & NTFS were released in 1993 (possibly partly influenced by AIX ACLs in the late 80s influenced by VMS ACLs introduced the early 80s).

          ACLs were not introduced to standard POSIX until c.1998, and NFS and Linux filesystems didn’t get them until 2003. In fact, the design of the NFSv4 ACL standard was heavily influenced by the design of NTFS/Windows ACL model – a specific decision by the designers to model it more like NTFS rather than AIX/POSIX.

          Technically, at the filesystem level, exFAT also provides support for ACLs, but I am not sure if any implementation actually makes use of this feature (not even Windows AFAIK, certainly not any desktop version).

          • @davefischer@beehaw.org
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            69 months ago

            Windows NT ACLs come from VMS.

            The Unix world has traditionally not liked ACLs because Multics had them, and Unix was an ultra-minimalist response to Multics.

            • zero_iq
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              9 months ago

              Yep, you’re right. I was thinking of an ACL evolution/chain of influence of VMS -> AIX -> NT, but it seems VMS -> NT and VMS -> AIX as two separate histories is much more accurate. Thanks for the correction – I’ve updated my comment accordingly.

                • zero_iq
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                  29 months ago

                  VMS implemented ACLs in the early 80s. It’s design influenced the design of ACLs in both AIX and Windows NT.

                  • @davefischer@beehaw.org
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                    39 months ago

                    Yeah, I’m familiar with VMS, and Cutler bringing a lot of the internal design to W/NT. (I’m told in particular a lot of the data structures for system calls in NT look like VMS.) My AIX experience has consisted entirely of “This is weird. This isn’t normal for Unix.” Ha ha. (I had a 1st gen RS/6000 at home briefly in the late 90s.)

                    And I do have a “grey wall” in my library:

                    Image

          • @panicnow@lemmy.world
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            29 months ago

            Damn, giving me flashbacks of slowly moving through ACLs then hitting domain groups, domain local groups, global groups, then eventually universal groups as AD moved forward in complex situations.

            Got to admit it worked well though.

        • 520
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          9 months ago

          Bruh, Windows has had ACLs for decades. Before Linux, even. What are you smoking?

          I wouldn’t be surprised if the NTFS driver for Linux doesn’t support ACLs though.