On Tue, Dec 02, 2014 at 07:55:48PM +0200, Boaz Harrosh wrote: > > This I do not understand. I thought that I_DIRTY_TIME, and the all > lazytime mount option, is only for atime. So if there are dirty > pages then there are also m/ctime that changed and surly we want to > write these times to disk ASAP. What are the situations where you are most concerned about mtime or ctime being accurate after a crash? I've been running with it on my laptop for a while now, and it's certainly not a problem for build trees; remember, whenever you need to update the inode to update i_blocks or i_size, the inode (with its updated timestamps) will be flushed to disk anyway. In actual practice, what happens in a build tree is that when make decides that it needs to update a generated file, when the file is created as a zero-length inode, m/ctime will be set to the time that file is created, which is newer than its source files. As the file is written, the mtime is updated each time that we actually need to do an allocating write. In the case of the linker, it will seek to the beginning of the file to update ELF header at the very end of its operation, and *that* time will be left stale, such that the in-memory mtime is perhaps a millisecond ahead of the on-disk mtime. But in the case of a crash, either time is such that make won't be confused. I'm not aware of an application which is doing a large number of non-allocating random writes (for example, such as a database), where said database actually cares about mtime being correct. In fact, most databases use fdatasync() to prevent the mtimes from being sync'ed out to disk on each transaction, so they don't have guaranteed timestamp accuracy after a crash anyway. The problem is even if the database is using fdatasync(), every five seconds we end up updating the mtime anyway --- and in the case of ext4, we end up needing to take various journal locks which on a sufficiently parallel workload and a sufficiently fast disk, can actually cause measurable contention. Did you have such a use case or application in mind? > if we are lazytime also with m/ctime then I think I would like an > option for only atime lazy. because m/ctime is cardinal to some > operations even though I might want atime lazy. If there's a sufficiently compelling use case where we do actually care about mtime/ctime being accurate, and the current semantics don't provide enough of a guarantee, it's certainly something we could do. I'd rather keep things simple unless it's really there. (After all, we did create the strictatime mount option, but I'm not sure anyone every ends up using it. It woud be a shame if we created a strictcmtime, which had the same usage rate.) I'll also note that if it's only about atime updates, with the default relatime mount option, I'm not sure there's enough of a win to hae a mode to justify a lazyatime only option. If you really neeed strict c/mtime after a crash, maybe the best thing to do is to just simply not use the lazytime mount option and be done with it. Cheeres, - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
