On Wed, 08 Aug 2007 14:10:15 -0700
"Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Why isn't this easily fixable by just adding an additional dirty
flag that says atime has changed? Then we only cause a write
when we remove the inode from the inode cache, if only atime
is updated.
I think that could be made to work, and it would fix the performance
issue.
It is a behaviour change. At present ext3 (for example) commits everything
every five seconds. After a change like this, a crash+recovery could cause
a file's atime to go backwards by an arbitrarily large time interval - it
could easily be months.