From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jeff Layton Subject: Re: [PATCH 02/18] xstat: Add a pair of system calls to make extended file stats available [ver #6] Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2010 09:25:29 -0400 Message-ID: <20100801092529.5e6ba0e0@corrin.poochiereds.net> References: <20100715021709.5544.64506.stgit@warthog.procyon.org.uk> <20100715021712.5544.44845.stgit@warthog.procyon.org.uk> <30448.1279800887@redhat.com> <1280524978.2452.9.camel@segv.aura.of.mankind> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Linus Torvalds , Jeremy Allison , Volker.Lendecke-3ekOc4rQMZmzQB+pC5nmwQ@public.gmane.org, David Howells , Jan Engelhardt , linux-cifs-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org, linux-nfs-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org, samba-technical-w/Ol4Ecudpl8XjKLYN78aQ@public.gmane.org, linux-kernel-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org, viro-RmSDqhL/yNMiFSDQTTA3OLVCufUGDwFn@public.gmane.org, linux-fsde-kxMDh+IBDuj1P9xLtpHBDw@public.gmane.org To: utz lehmann Return-path: In-Reply-To: <1280524978.2452.9.camel-mrvVnycP54q9CgvvYfeeSAlEImK53Lvc@public.gmane.org> Sender: linux-nfs-owner-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org List-Id: linux-cifs.vger.kernel.org On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:22:58 +0200 utz lehmann wrote: > On Thu, 2010-07-22 at 09:40 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > But the fact is, th Unix ctime semantics are insane and largely > > useless. There's a damn good reason almost nobody uses ctime under > > unix. > > > > So what I'm suggesting is that we have a flag - either per-process or > > per-mount - that just says "use windows semantics for ctime". > > When abusing an existing time stamp use atime not ctime please. > ctime has it's uses. atime was just a mistake and is nearly useless. > > And with noatime we already have creation time semantics for atime. > Ugh. Honestly all of this talk of abusing different time fields seems like craziness to me. It's going to be very hard to do that without breaking *something*. There's also very little reason to do this when xattrs are a much cleaner approach. Neil Brown has put forth a very reasoned justification for putting the birthtime in an xattr. After reading it, I think that makes more sense than anything. It's also something that can be done without any extra infrastructure. If at some point in the future we get an xstat-like syscall then we can always add birthtime to that as well. Ditto for the other fields under discussion (i_generation and the like). -- Jeff Layton -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-nfs" in the body of a message to majordomo-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html