Re: Apparent backward time travel in timestamps on file creation

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 10:30 AM, David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> I've been writing a testcase for xfstests to test statx.  However, it's turned
> up what I think is a bug in the kernel's time-tracking system.  If I do:
>
>         date +%s.%N
>         touch foo
>         dump-timestamps foo
>
> such that foo is created, sometimes the atime, mtime and ctime timestamps on
> foo will be *before* the time printed by 'date'.

I don't think our filesystem timestamps have ever been equivalent to
"gettimeofday()".

The "gettimeofday()" times are actually fairly expensive to calculate
(although we've optimized that code heavily, because it's a very
common system call in many loads). We try to give gettimeofday() much
higher precision than any other time in the system: it not only
participates in all the NTP stuff, we also actually read the hardware
time register (hopefully the TSC, but it can be any time source) and
interpolate that very carefully to give a high-quality clock value
that is *much* higher precision than the timer tick.

In contrast, the filesystem times are based on CURRENT_TIME (and the
modern variation: "current_time(inode)") that is a completely
different animal. It truncates the time to the inode time granularity,
yes, but there's a much more fundamental thing going on: instead of
using that exact gettimeofday() thing, it just uses
"current_kernel_time()".

And current_kernel_time() doesn't do *any* of the fancy "interpolate
high-quality hardware clock" stuff. No, it just uses "xtime" that is
updated by the timer interrupt (ok, that's slightly simplified,
'xtime' is no longer just a single global, we have a per-timekeeping
one these days, but it's historically and conceptually what we're
doing).

The difference can be quite noticeable - basically the
"gettimeofday()" time will interpolate within timer ticks, while
"xtime" is just the truncated "time at timer tick" value _without_ the
correction.

And none of this is new. It goes back to forever. Any Linux version
that had gettimeofday() with the finer-grained offset. Not 0.01 (I
checked).

[ Goes digging. Ok, the gettimeofday timer interpolation was added in
April, 1993 in version 0.99.9 ]

So it's been like this for about 24 years now.

                  Linus