According to the code, the current implement of HDFS only supports one specific type of block placement policy, which is BlockPlacementPolicyDefault by default.The default policy is enough for most of the circumstances, but under some special circumstances, it works not so well.
For example, on a shared cluster, we want to erasure encode all the files under some specified directories. So the files under these directories need to use a new placement policy.But at the same time, other files still use the default placement policy. Here we need to support multiple placement policies for the HDFS.
One plain thought is that, the default placement policy is still configured as the default. On the other hand, HDFS can let user specify customized placement policy through the extended attributes(xattr). When the HDFS choose the replica targets, it firstly check the customized placement policy, if not specified, it fallbacks to the default one. Any thoughts?
