"Here's a new version of my credentials patch. It's still very basic, with only Ext3, (V)FAT, NFS, AFS, SELinux and keyrings compiled in on an x86_64 arch kernel," stated David Howells. He described the patch as, "introduce a copy on write credentials record (struct cred). The fsuid, fsgid, supplementary groups list move into it (DAC security). The session, process and thread keyrings are reflected in it, but don't primarily reside there as they aren't per-thread and occasionally need to be instantiated or replaced by other threads or processes."

Casey Schaufler asked, "what I don't really understand is what value is gained by this exercise. Are the savings sufficiently significant to justify the effort?" Trond Myklebust explained, "it is not about savings, but about new functionality. Basically, the existence of reference-counted credentials will allow AFS and NFS to cache that information and use it for deferred writes etc." David added, "and also make it easier for cachefiles and hopefully NFSd to override the active security. There's a comment somewhere in, I think, the SunRPC code in the Linux kernel bemoaning the lack of this very feature:-)"