Re: [PATCH 2/2] Make relatime default

Frans Pop
2009-03-27T02:05:34Z

On Friday 27 March 2009, you wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Mar 2009, Frans Pop wrote:
> > I guess users and distros can still elect not to set it as default,
> > but it still seems a bit like going from one extreme to another.
>
> Why? RELATIME has been around since 2006 now. Nothing has happened.
> People who think "we should leave it up to user land" lost their
> credibility long ago.

As I think Andrew already noted, the discussion today is largely a rehash
of one in 2007, summarized by lwn [1] and kerneltrap [2]. That's also
when Ingo first submitted the patch (based on a suggestion from you). But
it has been blocked by others twice, and for exactly the same reasons.

relatime *without* the 24-hour safeguard has unanimously been deemed
unsuitable as a default by distros.
So the real problem is that nobody ever did the work needed to make Ingo's
original patch acceptable to the fs devs and the resulting stalemate for
the last 1 3/4 years. IMO that's mainly a kernel community failure and
not a user land failure. You've now at least broken that stalemate.

Your statement is also not quite true. At least Ubuntu has had relatime
enabled by default for new installations for a couple of releases. And
AFAICT they now even have it enabled by default now in their kernel
config, but I'm not entirely sure.

For Debian Lenny (current stable release), relatime is a mount option that
can be activated during new installs (admittedly only if you look hard
enough). All that would have been needed for Debian to enable relatime by
default for new installs was to have something like the *first* patch of
the three you've now committed to have been included in 2.6.26.

Cheers,
FJP

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/244829/
[2] http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148