Re: Noatime vs relatime

From: Matti Aarnio
Date: Fri Aug 10 2007 - 11:11:27 EST


On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 07:26:46AM -0700, Vlad wrote:
...
> "Warning: Atime will be disabled by default in future kernel versions,
> but you will still be able to turn it on when configuring the kernel."
>
> This should give a heads-up to the 0.001% of people who still use
> atime so that they know to customize this option or start using modern
> file-monitoring techniques like inotify.

NO for two reasons:
- atime semantics are just fine in server environments
- inotify IS NOT scalable to millions of files, nor
to situations where we want to check alteration weeks
or months after the fact

In reality I would perhaps prefer mount-behaviour being altered
from 'by default do atime' to 'by default do noatime.

There MUST be an easy way to tell system that "yes, I want to track
last accesstime."


I did recently an embedded Linux PC system where the entire
system disk is a single Compact Flash -card. I tried to play
with noatime option, but the system still kept writing things,
and thus I had to do full and somewhat drastic read-only.


> Vlad

/Matti Aarnio
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