Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/6] Enhanced file stat system call

Steve French
2016-05-06T02:00:18Z

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 5:54 PM, Steve French <smfrench@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:46 AM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:
>> On Friday 29 April 2016 13:57:36 David Howells wrote:
>>> struct statx *buffer);
>>>
>>> This is an enhanced file stat function that provides a number of useful
>>> features, in summary:
>>>
>>> (1) More information: creation time, data version number, inode
>>> generation
>>> number and flags. A subset of these is available through a number of
>>> filesystems (such as CIFS, NFS, AFS, Ext4 and BTRFS).
>>>
>>
>> I have a question about birthtime/creationtime: As we are gaining a way
>> to read this, should we also provide a way to update it using a new
>> variant
>> of the utimensat syscall in order to have 'cp -a' create an identical
>> copy,
>> or is the idea that this is defined as the time that is particular copy
>> of the inode was created?
>>
>> I've discussed this with Deepa in the past, as she is driving the
>> convertion of the inode timestamps to timespec64 now, and we will
>> need a new version of utimensat for her work as well. I can see good
>> reasons either way (allowing updates of btime or disallowing them).
>
It would help interop with Windows (and presumably Mac) if birth time can be
updated

--
Thanks,

Steve