KVM: Don't pre-reserve xarray entries when storing empty/NULL attributesgrafted

Skip the xarray reservation loop when clearing all memory attributes, as
storing NULL only erases the entry and never needs to allocate, so no
reservation (and no cleanup of a failed one) is required in that case.

Suggested-by: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
Cc: David Ballesteros <davimaba.v@proton.me>
Signed-off-by: Zeng Chi <zengchi@kylinos.cn>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260921102442.1232375-1-zeng_chi911@163.com
[sean: split to separate patch]
Signed-off-by: Sean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>

1 files changed, 18 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/eainode.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/eainode.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..7a2ef26b0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/eainode.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+.. 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.