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

Theodore Ts'o
2014-11-27T20:20:08Z

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.

- Ted