Re: [PATCH-v4 2/7] vfs: add support for a lazytime mount option

Jan Kara
2014-11-28T12:41:49Z

On Thu 27-11-14 15:19:54, Ted Tso wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 02:14:21PM +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> > Looking into the code & your patch I'd prefer to do something like:
> > * add support for I_DIRTY_TIME in __mark_inode_dirty() - update_time will
> > call __mark_inode_dirty() with this flag if any of the times was updated.
> > That way we can just remove your ->write_time() callback - filesystems
> > can just handle this in their ->dirty_inode() methods if they wish.
> > __mark_inode_dirty() will take care of moving inode into proper writeback
> > list (i_dirty / i_dirty_time), dirtied_when will be set to current time.
>
> One of the tricky bits about this is that btrfs wants to be able to
> return an error from write_time() which gets reflected up through
> update_time() to the callers of file_update_time(). Currently
> __mark_inode_dirty() and family return a void, and changing this is
> going to be a bit of a mess, since doing this correctly would require
> auditing all of the callers of mark_inode_dirty(),
> mark_inode_dirty_sync(), __mark_inode_dirty(), etc.
>
> Doing this would be a good thing, and eventually I think it would be
> nice if we could allow the mark_inode_dirty() functions return an
> error instead of void, but I wonder if that's a cleanup that's better
> saved for later. While we were at it, maybe we should rename
> mark_inode_dirty() to inode_dirty(), since that way we can be sure
> we've looked at all of the call site of mark_inode_dirty() and friends
> --- and we have a number of file systems, including btrfs, ext3, and
> ext4, where mark_inode_dirty() is doing a lot more than just marking
> the inode is dirty, and the only reason why it's named that is mostly
> historical.
Except that lots of callers of update_time() / file_update_time() just
ignore the return value anyway. And frankly most of the time it's a
simplification we can get away with. I agree that ultimately we should
propagate and handle these errors but as you say above handling errors from
__mark_inode_dirty() is what we'd really need - that handles the whole
class of errors. So for now I would be OK, with just ignoring the error
when updating time stamps.

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
SUSE Labs, CR