> Currently touch_atime and file_update_time directly update a/c/mtime
> in the inode and just mark the inode dirty afterwards. This is pretty
> bad for some more complex filesystems that have various different types
> of dirtying an inode and/or need to store the data in another place
> for example for a buffer to be logged.
>
> This patch changes touch_atime and file_update_time to not update the
> inode directly but rather call through ->setattr into the filessystem.
Do we know what effect this will have on read/write performance? I
can imagine that some ->setattr() implementations are orders of
magnitude slower than just dirtying the inode.
> There is a new ATTR_UPDTIMES flag for these two calls so filesystems
> know it's just a timestampts update. This allows some optimizations
> and also allow to kill the IS_NOCMTIME we curretly have for networked
> filesystem by letting them simpliy ignore these kind of updates.
>
> There is also a new ATTR_VERSION flag sent from file_update_time
> that tells the filesystem to update i_version because this update
> has the same issues as the timestamp updates.
>
> As a side-effect of the optimiation to not perfrom redundant timestamp
> updates has been moved from touch_atime and file_update_time to
> notify_change and thus applies to explicit utimes calls, too.
This optimization is fishy. Remember, inode->i_*time are just cached
values, and the actual times on the (remote) filesystem itself can
differ. Which means that we will now optimize out a "touch" because
we happened to have the current time cached in the inode. Not that
this would be a likely event, but still...
So at least this check should be made dependent on ATTR_UPDTIMES, and
explicit time updates left alone.
Miklos
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