Re: [GIT PULL v2] timestamp fixes

[Amir Goldstein]

On Sat, Sep 23, 2023 at 8:49 PM Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 22 Sept 2023 at 23:36, Amir Goldstein <amir73il@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Apparently, they are willing to handle the "year 2486" issue ;)
>
> Well, we could certainly do the same at the VFS layer.
>
> But I suspect 10ns resolution is entirely overkill, since on a lot of
> platforms you don't even have timers with that resolution.
>
> I feel like 100ns is a much more reasonable resolution, and is quite
> close to a single system call (think "one thousand cycles at 10GHz").
>

You are right. 100ns is enough resolution for fs timestamps, but:

   1. We cannot truncate existing timestamps on existing files
that are stored in 1ns format even if the 100ns remainder is garbage,
applications depend on tv_nsec not changing, so if vfs truncates to
100ns, filesystems will need to carry the remainder anyway.

   2. The whole idea behind multigrain time is that the 100ns remainder
space is available in on-disk timestamps formats and is not going away,
so better not let it go to waste on garbage and use is for "change cookie".

> > But the resolution change is counter to the purpose of multigrain
> > timestamps - if two syscalls updated the same or two different inodes
> > within a 100ns tick, apparently, there are some workloads that
> > care to know about it and fs needs to store this information persistently.
>
> Those workloads are broken garbage, and we should *not* use that kind
> of sh*t to decide on VFS internals.
>

Sorry, I phrased it completely wrong.
The workloads don't expect 1ns resolution.
The workloads just compare timestamps of objects and expect some sane
not-before ordering rules.
If user visible timestamps are truncated to 100ns all is good.

> End result: we should ABSOLUTELY NOT have as a target to support some
> insane resolution.

This is not the target.

I think the target is explained well in this new v8 revision [1]
of the patch set which does exactly what you promote -
it hides the insane resolution in fs timestamps from users.

Thanks,
Amir.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/CAOQ4uxjGofKT2LcM_YmoMYsH42ETpB5kxQkh+21nCbYc=w1nEg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/T/#mbc87e67faf71cc58c6424335333935bf7740d49e