On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 06:45:00AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 05:43:27PM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote: > > To me, the interesting question is whether this allows us to turn on > > i_version updates by default on xfs and ext4. > > XFS v5 file systems have it on by default. Great, thanks. > Although we'll still need to agree on the exact semantics of i_version > before it's going to be useful. Once it's figured out maybe we should write it up for a manpage that could be used if statx starts exposing it to userspace. A first attempt: - It's a u64. - It works for regular files and directories. (What about symlinks or other special types?) - It changes between two checks if and only if there were intervening data or metadata changes. The change will always be an increase, but the amount of the increase is meaningless. - NFS doesn't actually require that it increases, but I think it should. I assume 64 bits means we don't need a discussion of wraparound. - AFS wants an actual counter: if you get i_version X, then write twice, then get i_version X+2, you're allowed to assume your writes were the only modifications. Let's ignore this for now. In the future if someone explains how to count operations, then we can extend the interface to tell the caller it can get those extra semantics. - It's durable; the above comparison still works if there were reboots between the two i_version checks. - I don't know how realistic this is--we may need to figure out if there's a weaker guarantee that's still useful. Do filesystems actually make ctime/mtime/i_version changes atomically with the changes that caused them? What if a change attribute is exposed to an NFS client but doesn't make it to disk, and then that value is reused after reboot? Am I missing any issues? --b.
