Re: [PATCH v7 12/13] ext4: switch to multigrain timestamps

Christian Brauner
2023-09-20T11:49:27Z

> > > While we initially thought we can do this unconditionally it turns out
> > > that this might break existing workloads that rely on timestamps in very
> > > specific ways and we always knew this was a possibility. Move
> > > multi-grain timestamps behind a vfs mount option.
> >
> > Surely this is a safe choice as it moves the responsibility to the sysadmin
> > and the cases where finegrained timestamps are required. But I kind of
> > wonder how is the sysadmin going to decide whether mgtime is safe for his
> > system or not? Because the possible breakage needn't be obvious at the
> > first sight...
> >
>
> That's the main reason I really didn't want to go with a mount option.
> Documenting that may be difficult. While there is some pessimism around
> it, I may still take a stab at just advancing the coarse clock whenever
> we fetch a fine-grained timestamp. It'd be nice to remove this option in
> the future if that turns out to be feasible.
>
> > If I were a sysadmin, I'd rather opt for something like
> > finegrained timestamps + lazytime (if I needed the finegrained timestamps
> > functionality). That should avoid the IO overhead of finegrained timestamps
> > as well and I'd know I can have problems with timestamps only after a
> > system crash.
>
> > I've just got another idea how we could solve the problem: Couldn't we
> > always just report coarsegrained timestamp to userspace and provide access
> > to finegrained value only to NFS which should know what it's doing?
> >
>
> I think that'd be hard. First of all, where would we store the second
> timestamp? We can't just truncate the fine-grained ones to come up with
> a coarse-grained one. It might also be confusing having nfsd and local
> filesystems present different attributes.

As far as I can tell we have two options. The first one is to make this
into a mount option which I really think isn't a big deal and lets us
avoid this whole problem while allowing filesytems exposed via NFS to
make use of this feature for change tracking.

The second option is that we turn off fine-grained finestamps for v6.6
and you get to explore other options.

It isn't a big deal regressions like this were always to be expected but
v6.6 needs to stabilize so anything that requires more significant work
is not an option.