> : well one such little point is POSIX conformance
>
> Yes, the default should remain to update the atime, but there may
> well be people who don't mind losing a little POSIX conformance in
> return for better performance. Me for example.
>
> This patch could also be useful for people who spin down their disk
> drives after a certain period of inactivity. At the moment the
> disk gets spun up again to write the atime every time some daemon
> (like cron) wakes up and reads a file that was in the cache anyway.
> So it will probably be popular with laptop owners.
>
> I'll be using this patch, and I hope it makes it into 2.1.
i got warned by the author, that you cant use this for ordinary
filesytstems, since some applications rely on this behaviour. One thing is
"new mail checking". I'm sure i dont want to loose/change such a feature
Things get messy if you go breaking standards :(
-- mingo