Re: [man-pages RFC PATCH v4] statx, inode: document the new STATX_INO_VERSION field

NeilBrown
2022-09-14T23:03:14Z

On Thu, 15 Sep 2022, NeilBrown wrote:
>
> When the code was written, the inode semaphore (before mutexes) was held
> over the whole thing, and timestamp resolution was 1 second. So
> ordering didn't really matter. Since then locking has bee reduced and
> precision increased but no-one saw any need to fix the ordering. I
> think that is fine for timestamps.

Actually it is much more complex than that, though the principle is
still the same

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/history/history.git/commit/?id=636b38438001a00b25f23e38747a91cb8428af29

shows i_mtime updates being moved from *after* a call to
generic_file_write() in each filesystem to *early* in the body of
generic_file_write(). Probably because that was just a convenient place
to put it.

NeilBrown