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

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

> Sage> I think this is the fundamental question: who do we give the
> Sage> ammunition to, the user or app writer, or the sysadmin?
> 
> Sage> One might argue that we gave the user a similar power with
> Sage> O_NOATIME (the power to break applications that assume atime is
> Sage> accurate).  Here we give developers/users the power to not
> Sage> update mtime and suffer the consequences (like, obviously,
> Sage> breaking mtime-based backups).  It should be pretty obvious to
> Sage> anyone using the flag what the consequences are.
> 
> Not modifying atime doesn't really break anything except people who
> think they can tell when a file was last accessed.  Which isn't
> critical (unless your in a paranoid security conscious place...) but
> MTIME is another beast entirely.   Turning that off is going to break
> lots of hidden assumptions.  
> 
> Sage> Note that we can suffer similar lapses in mtime with fdatasync
> Sage> followed by a system crash.  And as Andy points out it's
> Sage> semi-broken for writable mmap.  The crash case is obviously a
> Sage> slightly different thing, but the idea that mtime can't always
> Sage> be trusted certainly isn't crazy talk.
> 
> True, but after a crash... people expect and understand there might be
> corruption in a filesystem.

Umm. No; people do not expect anything newer than ext3 to get
corrupted, ever.

In fact, I did not know about fdatasync/crash. That's rather nasty
surprise.

									Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html