Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1161224AbWHER0r (ORCPT ); Sat, 5 Aug 2006 13:26:47 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1030338AbWHER0r (ORCPT ); Sat, 5 Aug 2006 13:26:47 -0400 Received: from s-utl01-sjpop.stsn.net ([72.254.0.201]:62338 "HELO s-utl01-sjpop.stsn.net") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S1030281AbWHER0q (ORCPT ); Sat, 5 Aug 2006 13:26:46 -0400 Subject: Re: [RFC] [PATCH] Relative lazy atime From: Arjan van de Ven To: Dave Kleikamp Cc: Christoph Hellwig , Valerie Henson , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, Akkana Peck , Mark Fasheh , Jesse Barnes , Chris Wedgwood , jsipek@cs.sunysb.edu, Al Viro In-Reply-To: <1154797123.12108.6.camel@kleikamp.austin.ibm.com> References: <20060803063622.GB8631@goober> <20060805122537.GA23239@lst.de> <1154797123.12108.6.camel@kleikamp.austin.ibm.com> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Sat, 05 Aug 2006 19:04:34 +0200 Message-Id: <1154797475.3054.79.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.2.3 (2.2.3-2.fc4) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1558 Lines: 29 On Sat, 2006-08-05 at 11:58 -0500, Dave Kleikamp wrote: > On Sat, 2006-08-05 at 14:25 +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > > On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 11:36:22PM -0700, Valerie Henson wrote: > > > (Corrected Chris Wedgwood's name and email.) > > > > > > My friend Akkana followed my advice to use noatime on one of her > > > machines, but discovered that mutt was unusable because it always > > > thought that new messages had arrived since the last time it had > > > checked a folder (mbox format). I thought this was a bummer, so I > > > wrote a "relative lazy atime" patch which only updates the atime if > > > the old atime was less than the ctime or mtime. This is not the same > > > as the lazy atime patch of yore[1], which maintained a list of inodes > > > with dirty atimes and wrote them out on unmount. > > > > Another idea, similar to how atime updates work in xfs currently might > > be interesting: Always update atime in core, but don't start a > > transaction just for it - instead only flush it when you'd do it anyway, > > that is another transaction or evicting the inode. > > Hmm. That adds a cost to evicting what the vfs considers a clean inode. the vfs shouldn't consider it clean, it should consider it "atime-only dirty".. with that many of the vfs interaction issues ought to go away - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/