Re: [PATCH] time.c::timespec_trunc: fix nanosecond file time rounding

Karsten Blees
2015-06-16T22:39:12Z

Am 16.06.2015 um 19:07 schrieb John Stultz:
> On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 10:36 AM, Karsten Blees <karsten.blees@gmail.com> wrote:
>> From: Karsten Blees <blees@dcon.de>
>> Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2015 10:50:28 +0200
>>
>> The rounding optimization in timespec_trunc() is based on the incorrect
>> assumptions that current_kernel_time() is rounded to jiffies resolution,
>> and that jiffies resolution is a multiple of all potential file time
>> granularities.
>
> Sorry, this is a little opaque on the first read. You're saying that
> there are filesystems where the on-disk granularity is smaller then a
> tick/jiffy, but larger then a nanosecond, right?
>

Yes, examples include CIFS, NTFS (100 ns) and CEPH, UDF (1000 ns).

The current code assumes that rounding can be avoided if (gran <= ns_per_tick).

However, this optimization is only valid if:

1. current_kernel_time().tv_nsec is already rounded to tick resolution.
E.g. with HZ=1000 you would get tv_nsec = 1000000, 2000000, 3000000, but
never 1000001. AFAICT this is not true; current_kernel_time() may be
incremented only once per tick, but its not rounded to tick resolution.

2. ns_per_tick is evenly divisible by gran, for all potential HZ and
granularity values. IOW "(ns_per_tick % gran) == 0". This may have been
true for HZ=100, 250, 1000, but not for HZ=300. E.g. if assumption 1
above was true, HZ=300 would give you tv_nsec = 3333333, 6666666,
9999999... This would definitely need to be rounded to e.g. UDF
resolution, even though (1000 <= 3333333) is clearly true.

>> Thus, sub-second portions of in-core file times are not rounded to on-disk
>> granularity. I.e. file times may change when the inode is re-read from disk
>> or when the file system is remounted.
>>
>> File systems with on-disk resolutions of exactly 1 ns or 1 s are not
>> affected by this.
>>
>> Steps to reproduce with e.g. UDF:
>>
>> $ dd if=/dev/zero of=udfdisk count=10000 && mkudffs udfdisk
>> $ mkdir udf && mount udfdisk udf
>> $ touch udf/test && stat -c %y udf/test
>> 2015-06-09 10:22:56.130006767 +0200
>> $ umount udf && mount udfdisk udf
>> $ stat -c %y udf/test
>> 2015-06-09 10:22:56.130006000 +0200
>>
>> Remounting rounds the mtime to 1µs.
>>
>> Fix the rounding in timespec_trunc() and update the documentation.
>>
>> Note: This does _not_ fix the issue for FAT's 2 second mtime resolution,
>> as struct super_block.s_time_gran isn't prepared to handle different
>> ctime / mtime / atime resolutions nor resolutions > 1 second.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Karsten Blees <blees@dcon.de>
>> ---
>>
>> This issue came up in a recent discussion on the git ML about enabling
>> nanosecond file times on Windows, see
>>
>> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.msysgit/21290/focus=21315
>>
>>
>> kernel/time/time.c | 17 ++++-------------
>> 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/kernel/time/time.c b/kernel/time/time.c
>> index 972e3bb..362ee06 100644
>> --- a/kernel/time/time.c
>> +++ b/kernel/time/time.c
>> @@ -287,23 +287,14 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL(jiffies_to_usecs);
>> * @t: Timespec
>> * @gran: Granularity in ns.
>> *
>> - * Truncate a timespec to a granularity. gran must be smaller than a second.
>> - * Always rounds down.
>> - *
>> - * This function should be only used for timestamps returned by
>> - * current_kernel_time() or CURRENT_TIME, not with do_gettimeofday() because
>> - * it doesn't handle the better resolution of the latter.
>> + * Truncate a timespec to a granularity. gran must not be greater than a
>> + * second (10^9 ns). Always rounds down.
>> */
>> struct timespec timespec_trunc(struct timespec t, unsigned gran)
>> {
>> - /*
>> - * Division is pretty slow so avoid it for common cases.
>> - * Currently current_kernel_time() never returns better than
>> - * jiffies resolution. Exploit that.
>> - */
>> - if (gran <= jiffies_to_usecs(1) * 1000) {
>> + if (gran <= 1) {
>> /* nothing */
>
> So this change will in effect, cause us to truncate where granularity
> was less then one tick, where before we didn't do anything. Have you
> reviewed all users to ensure this is safe (I assume you have, but it
> might be good to describe which users are affected in the commit
> message)?
>
>

timespec_trunc() is exclusively used to calculate inode's [acm]time.
It is mostly called through current_fs_time(), only a handful of fs
drivers use it directly (but always with super_block.s_time_gran as
second argument).

So I think changing the function to do what the documentation says it
does should be safe...

>> - } else if (gran == 1000000000) {
>> + } else if (gran >= 1000000000) {
>> t.tv_nsec = 0;
>
> While the code (which is quite old) wasn't super intuitive, this looks
> to be making it more subtle instead of more clear. So if the
> granularity is larger then a second, we just truncate to a second?
> That seems surprising. If handling granularity larger then a second
> isn't supported, we should probably make that explicit and add a
> WARN_ON to catch problematic users of the function.

Indeed, I changed this to catch invalid arguments (similar to how
"gran <= 1" catches 0 and thus prevents division by zero).

What about this instead?

if (gran == 1) {
/* nothing */
} else if (gran == 1000000000) {
t.tv_nsec = 0;
} else if (gran < 1 || gran > 1000000000) {
WARN_ON(1);
} else {
t.tv_nsec -= t.tv_nsec % gran;
}
return t;

I.e. only the few file systems that need rounding are affected by
extra comparisons.

> Or we should
> rework the logic to properly handle more coarse granularities (which
> from your description it sounds like the FAT case needs?).

AFAIK FAT is the only file system with such coarse granularities
(1 day for atime, 2s for mtime, 10ms for create time, there is no ctime
aka "change time" field). I think this is such a special case that it
should better be handled in the FAT driver.

Thanks,
Karsten