Re: [PATCH v2 00/11] fs: multigrain timestamp redux

Josef Bacik
2024-07-01T13:53:35Z

On Mon, Jul 01, 2024 at 06:26:36AM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> This set is essentially unchanged from the last one, aside from the
> new file in Documentation/. I had a review comment from Andi Kleen
> suggesting that the ctime_floor should be per time_namespace, but I
> think that's incorrect as the realtime clock is not namespaced.
>
> At LSF/MM this year, we had a discussion about the inode change
> attribute. At the time I mentioned that I thought I could salvage the
> multigrain timestamp work that had to be reverted last year [1]. That
> version had to be reverted because it was possible for a file to get a
> coarse grained timestamp that appeared to be earlier than another file
> that had recently gotten a fine-grained stamp.
>
> This version corrects the problem by establishing a per-time_namespace
> ctime_floor value that should prevent this from occurring. In the above
> situation that was problematic before, the two files might end up with
> the same timestamp value, but they won't appear to have been modified in
> the wrong order.
>
> That problem was discovered by the test-stat-time gnulib test. Note that
> that test still fails on multigrain timestamps, but that's because its
> method of determining the minimum delay that will show a timestamp
> change will no longer work with multigrain timestamps. I have a patch to
> change the testcase to use a different method that I've posted to the
> bug-gnulib mailing list.
>
> The big question with this set is whether the performance will be
> suitable. The testing I've done seems to show performance parity with
> multigrain timestamps enabled, but it's hard to rule this out regressing
> some workload.
>
> This set is based on top of Christian's vfs.misc branch (which has the
> earlier change to track inode timestamps as discrete integers). If there
> are no major objections, I'd like to let this soak in linux-next for a
> bit to see if any problems shake out.
>
> [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20230807-mgctime-v7-0-d1dec143a704@kernel.org/
>
> Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>

I have a few nits that need to be addressed, but you can add

Reviewed-by: Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>

to the series once they're addressed. Thanks,

Josef