Re: [PATCH] loop: Update mtime when writing using aops

From: Jens Axboe
Date: Thu Apr 08 2010 - 15:38:45 EST


On Thu, Apr 08 2010, Tvrtko Ursulin wrote:
> On Thursday 08 April 2010 13:45:39 Jens Axboe wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 08 2010, Nikanth Karthikesan wrote:
> > > Update mtime when writing to backing filesystem using the address space
> > > operations write_begin and write_end.
> >
> > You forgot to include a 'why' :-)
> >
> > Not that I disagree with the patch, just curious what made you make the
> > change.
>
> You mean how the bug was found? I originally reported this problem against
> openSUSE 11.2 kernel, where when you have a dm-crypt loop filesystem the
> container file modification time does not get updated with use. Consequence
> of that is that backup runs would miss the fact container has changed.
>
> Maybe one could argue it is a security feature in this scenario :), but as the
> problem turns out to be unrelated to the crypto case, rather contained in the
> loop driver itself, it looks like that would not hold.

:-)

I suppose you could update the mtime on tear down, since then it would
also be safe to actually backup. But same difference in the end I
suppose, I'll add the patch.

--
Jens Axboe

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