From: Theodore Ts'o Subject: Re: [PATCH-v2 3/5] vfs: don't let the dirty time inodes get more than a day stale Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 12:10:54 -0500 Message-ID: <20141124171054.GB31339@thunk.org> References: <1416675267-2191-1-git-send-email-tytso@mit.edu> <1416675267-2191-4-git-send-email-tytso@mit.edu> <87egss3hsm.fsf@rasmusvillemoes.dk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, Ext4 Developers List , xfs@oss.sgi.com, linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org To: Rasmus Villemoes Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <87egss3hsm.fsf@rasmusvillemoes.dk> Sender: linux-btrfs-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ext4.vger.kernel.org On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 01:27:21PM +0100, Rasmus Villemoes wrote: > On Sat, Nov 22 2014, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > > > Guarantee that the on-disk timestamps will be no more than 24 hours > > stale. > > > > + unsigned short days_since_boot = jiffies / (HZ * 86400); > > This seems to wrap every 49 days (assuming 32 bit jiffies and HZ==1000), > so on-disk updates can be delayed indefinitely, assuming just the right > delays between writes. Good point, I'll fix this. > Would it make sense to introduce days_since_boot as a global variable > and avoid these issues? This would presumably also make update_time a > few cycles faster (avoiding a division-by-constant), but not sure if > that's important. And something of course needs to update > days_since_boot, but that should be doable. I can do this fairly simply like this: get_monotonic_boottime(&uptime); daycode = uptime.tv_sec / (HZ * 86400); and we only need to do this if lazytime is set, and the inode isn't marked as I_DIRTY_TIME: if ((inode->i_sb->s_flags & MS_LAZYTIME) && !(flags & S_VERSION)) { if (inode->i_state & I_DIRTY_TIME) return 0; get_monotonic_boottime(&uptime); daycode = do_div64(uptime.tv_sec do_div, (HZ * 86400)); if (!inode->i_ts_dirty_day || inode->i_ts_dirty_day == daycode) { spin_lock(&inode->i_lock); inode->i_state |= I_DIRTY_TIME; spin_unlock(&inode->i_lock); inode->i_ts_dirty_day = daycode; return 0; } } So I'm not entirely sure it's worth it to create a global variable for days since boot; I've been runnin with this patch in my laptop, we wouldn't be triggering the get_monotonic_bootime() function all that often. (Since once the dirty_time flg is set, we don't need to check about whether we need to set it again.) And if we *did* care, it would be simple enough to use a static counter which only recalculates daycode every 30 or 60 minutes. Cheers, - Ted