On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 02:21:34PM +0200, Jörn Engel wrote: > At the risk of stating the obvious, let me try to explain what each > method does: > > 1. standard > Every read access to a file/directory causes an atime update. > > 2. nodiratime > Every read access to a non-directory causes an atime update. > > 3. lazy atime > The first read access to a file/directory causes an atime update. > > 4. noatime > No read access to a file/directory causes an atime update. 5. lazy atime writeout To reduce the pain of a fully functional atime only flush "atime-dirty" inodes when the on-disk/in-core atime difference becomes big enough (e.g. by maintaining an "atime dirtyness" level for the in-core inode). I haven't seen anyone mentioning it but properly written cleanup programs for /tmp et.al. do depend on atimes. When a system crashes after a long time then (3) and (4) will probably cause /tmp to be wiped out because at the next boot all atimes will be really old. -- Frank - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
