Re: page fault scalability (ext3, ext4, xfs)

[David Lang <david@xxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 14 Aug 2013, Andy Lutomirski wrote:

> > The big problem with this approach is that not doing the
> > timestamp update on page faults is going to break the inode change
> > version counting because for ext4, btrfs and XFS it takes a
> > transaction to bump that counter. NFS needs to know the moment a
> > file is changed in memory, not when it is written to disk. Also, NFS
> > requires the change to the counter to be persistent over server
> > failures, so it needs to be changed as part of a transaction....
> NFS can do whatever it wants, although I suspect that even NFS can get
> away with deferring cmtime updates.
NFS already has to do syncs to make sure the data is safe on disk, have a flag 
that NFS can use to make the ctime safe, everyone else can get the performance 
improvement and NFS can have it's slow-but-safe approach.
David Lang