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From:   Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Date:   Fri, 16 Mar 2018 10:19:23 +0100
Message-ID: <CAK8P3a0fDM_ceEnpFcy7P9KoBABQuEnxKkzUPb_cqT4QHL=fOw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC v2 03/83] Add super.h.
To:     "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
        Andiry Xu <jix024@eng.ucsd.edu>,
        "Darrick J. Wong" <darrick.wong@oracle.com>,
        Linux FS Devel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        "linux-nvdimm@lists.01.org" <linux-nvdimm@lists.01.org>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>,
        "Rudoff, Andy" <andy.rudoff@intel.com>, coughlan@redhat.com,
        Steven Swanson <swanson@cs.ucsd.edu>,
        Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>, Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>,
        swhiteho@redhat.com, miklos@szeredi.hu,
        Jian Xu <andiry.xu@gmail.com>, Andiry Xu <jix024@cs.ucsd.edu>
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On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 3:59 AM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 09:38:29PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>>
>> You could also have a resolution of less than a nanosecond. Note
>> that today, the file time stamps generated by the kernel are in
>> jiffies resolution, so at best one millisecond. However, most modern
>> file systems go with the 64+32 bit timestamps because it's not all
>> that expensive.
>
> It actually depends on the architecture and the accuracy/granularity
> of the timekeeping hardware available to the system, but it's possible
> for the granularity of file time stamps to be up to one nanosecond.
> So you can get results like this:
>
> % stat unix_io.o
>   File: unix_io.o
>   Size: 55000           Blocks: 112        IO Block: 4096   regular file
> Device: fc01h/64513d    Inode: 19931278    Links: 1
> Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: (15806/   tytso)   Gid: (15806/   tytso)
> Access: 2018-03-15 18:09:21.679914182 -0400
> Modify: 2018-03-15 18:09:21.639914089 -0400
> Change: 2018-03-15 18:09:21.639914089 -0400

Note how the nanoseconds only differ in digits 2, 7, 8, and 9 though:

The atime update happened 4 jiffies (at HZ=100) after the mtime,
the low digits are presumably jitter or ntp adjustments.

This is the result of current_time() using the plain tk_xtime
rather than reading the highres clocksource as ktime_get_real_ts64()
does.

This was a performance optimization a long time ago. We could
make the current_time() behavior configurable if we want though,
e.g. at compile time, or as a per-mount option. It's probably more
common these days to have a highres clocksource that can
be read efficiently than it was back when current_fs_time()
was first introduced.

       Arnd