Re: ext4 features

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Trond Myklebust wrote:

>On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 18:37 -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
>  
>
>Linus might accept it, but I won't. It is totally unnecessary.
>  
>

By "totally unnecessary" you mean "I don't see why it's useful."

The reason for using noatime is to avoid generating disk activity while 
the data is being accessed. It's not usually used to hide the fact that 
the data has been used and is therefore useful to someone. In a perfect 
world, where money is no object, all data is on very fast storage which 
never fails. In my world I would like to identify which data, source or 
documentation, has been referenced over some period of time. This is 
useful for moving some data to slower (yes I mean less expensive) storage.

It's also useful to identify stuff which no one has used in a very long 
time and which is a candidate for not being on line at all.

By keeping lazy track of access time it's possible to still have that 
data, with minimal disk access cost. And to some people that can be 
really useful, such as those of us who have to justify expenditures.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979