Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] updating ctime and mtime at syncing
From: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
To: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>
Cc: salikhmetov@gmail.com, linux-mm@kvack.org, jakob@unthought.net,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, valdis.kletnieks@vt.edu, riel@redhat.com,
       ksm@42.dk, staubach@redhat.com, jesper.juhl@gmail.com,
       torvalds@linux-foundation.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org,
       protasnb@gmail.com
In-Reply-To: <E1JEP9P-0007RD-PP@pomaz-ex.szeredi.hu>
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Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:35:37 +0100
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On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 14:14 +0100, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > 2008/1/14, Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>:
> > > > http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2645
> > > >
> > > > Changes for updating the ctime and mtime fields for memory-mapped files:
> > > >
> > > > 1) new flag triggering update of the inode data;
> > > > 2) new function to update ctime and mtime for block device files;
> > > > 3) new helper function to update ctime and mtime when needed;
> > > > 4) updating time stamps for mapped files in sys_msync() and do_fsync();
> > > > 5) implementing the feature of auto-updating ctime and mtime.
> > >
> > > How exactly is this done?
> > >
> > > Is this catering for this case:
> > >
> > >  1 page is dirtied through mapping
> > >  2 app calls msync(MS_ASYNC)
> > >  3 page is written again through mapping
> > >  4 app calls msync(MS_ASYNC)
> > >  5 ...
> > >  6 page is written back
> > >
> > > What happens at 4?  Do we care about this one at all?
> > 
> > The POSIX standard requires updating the file times every time when msync()
> > is called with MS_ASYNC. I.e. the time stamps should be updated even
> > when no physical synchronization is being done immediately.
> 
> Yes.  However, on linux MS_ASYNC is basically a no-op, and without
> doing _something_ with the dirty pages (which afaics your patch
> doesn't do), it's impossible to observe later writes to the same page.
> 
> I don't advocate full POSIX conformance anymore, because it's probably
> too expensive to do (I've tried).  Rather than that, we should
> probably find some sane compromise, that just fixes the real life
> issue.  Here's a pointer to the thread about this:
> 
> http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/3/27/55
> 
> Your patch may be a good soultion, but you should describe in detail
> what it does when pages are dirtied, and when msync/fsync are called,
> and what happens with multiple msync calls that I've asked about.
> 
> I suspect your patch is ignoring writes after the first msync, but
> then why care about msync at all?  What's so special about the _first_
> msync?  Is it just that most test programs only check this, and not
> what happens if msync is called more than once?  That would be a bug
> in the test cases.

I must agree, doing the mmap dirty, MS_ASYNC, mmap retouch, MS_ASYNC
case correctly would need a lot more code which I doubt is worth the
effort.

It would require scanning the PTEs and marking them read-only again on
MS_ASYNC, and some more logic in set_page_dirty() because that currently
bails out early if the page in question is already dirty.


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