Re: [PATCH RFC] vfs: add a O_NOMTIME flag

[Zach Brown]

> > > The criteria for using O_NOMTIME is the same as for using O_NOATIME:
> > > owning the file or having the CAP_FOWNER capability.  If we're not
> > > comfortable allowing owners to prevent mtime/ctime updates then we
> > > should add a tunable to allow O_NOMTIME.  Maybe a mount option?
> > 
> > I dislike "turn off safety for performance" options because Joe
> > SpeedRacer will always select performance over safety.
> 
> Well, for ceph there's no safety concern.  They never use cmtime in
> these files.
> 
> So are you suggesting not implementing this and making them rework their
> IO paths to avoid the fs maintaining mtime so that we don't give Joe
> Speedracer more rope?  Or are we talking about adding some speed bumps
> that ceph can flip on that might give Joe Speedracer pause?

Maybe one way to make it less of an attractive nuisance would be to hide
it under open_by_handle_at().  Like xfs_open_by_handle() does today but
we probably don't want to unconditionally add it to the generic path so
we'd have a flag.

They want to move to opening by handles anyway to avoid dirent lookups
when opening cold files.

- z
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