Re: [PATCH -v6 2/2] Updating ctime and mtime for memory-mappedfiles

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Fri Jan 18 2008 - 13:00:27 EST




On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
> Bah, and will break on s390... so we'd need a page_mkclean() variant
> that doesn't actually clear dirty.

No, we simply want to not play all these very expensive games with dirty
in the first place.

Guys, mmap access times aren't important enough for this. It's not
specified closely enough, and people don't care enough.

Of the patches around so far, the best one by far seems to be the simple
four-liner from Miklos.

And even in that four-liner, I suspect that the *last* two lines are
actually incorrect: there's no point in updating the file time when the
page *becomes* dirty, we should update the file time when it is marked
clean, and "msync(MS_SYNC)" should update it as part of *that*.

So I think the file time update should be part of just the page writeout
logic, not by msync() or page faulting itself or anything like that.

Linus
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