Re: [PATCH-v4 1/7] vfs: split update_time() into update_time() and write_time()

[Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Dec 02, 2014 at 01:20:33AM -0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> Why do you need the additional I_DIRTY flag?  A "lesser"
> __mark_inode_dirty should never override a stronger one.

Agreed, will fix.

> Otherwise this looks fine to me, except that I would split the default
> implementation into a new generic_update_time helper.

Sure, I can do that.

> > XFS doesn't have a ->dirty_time yet, but that way XFS would be able to
> > use the I_DIRTY_TIME flag to log the journal timestamps if it so
> > desires, and perhaps drop the need for it to use update_time().
> 
> We will probably always need a ->update_time to proide proper locking
> around the timestamp updates.

Couldn't you let the VFS set the inode timesstamps and then have xfs's
->dirty_time(inode, I_DIRTY_TIME) copy the timestamps to the on-disk
inode structure under the appropriate lock, or am I missing something?

> In the current from the generic lazytime might even be a loss for XFS as
> we're already really good at batching updates from multiple inodes in
> the same cluster for the in-place writeback, so I really don't want
> to just enable it without those optimizations without a lot of testing.

Fair enough; it's not surprising that this might be much more
effective as an optimization for ext4, for no other reason that
timestamp updates are so much heavyweight for us.  I suspect that it
should be a win for btrfs, though, and it should definitely be a win
for those file systems that don't use journalling at all.

                                                     - Ted