Re: ext3 IO latency measurements

From: Giacomo A. Catenazzi
Date: Fri Mar 27 2009 - 08:06:44 EST


Alan Cox wrote:
And what's the argument for not doing it in the kernel?

The fact is, "atime" by default is just wrong.

It probably was a wrong default - twenty years ago. Actually it may well
have been a wrong default in Unix v6 8)

However
- atime behaviour is SuS required

so I propose an other mount option along to strictatime:
nowatime: it give the actual time as atime:
it is totally useless, but fast *and* POSIX compatible:
- no disk writes on accesses
- POSIX doesn't mandate the behaviour of other processes, so
we simulate that fs are scanned at every fs-tick.
- IMHO more programs break, but in this case only
the POSIX incompatible programs.


- there are users with systems out there using atime and dependant on
proper atime

This is the real problem.

ciao
cate

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