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

John Stultz
2015-06-16T17:07:19Z

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?

> 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)?

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

thanks
-john