Re: [GIT PULL v2] timestamp fixes

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, 25 Sept 2023 at 04:23, Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> The catch here is that we have at least some testcases that do things
> like set specific values in the mtime and atime, and then test that the
> same value is retrievable.

Yeah, I'm sure that happens. But as you say, we already have
per-filesystem granularity issues that means that there is some non-ns
granularity that those tests have to deal with.

Unless they currently just work on one or two filesystems, of course.

> Of course, that set truncates the values at jiffies granularity (~4ms on
> my box). That's well above 100ns, so it's possible that's too coarse for
> us to handwave this problem away.

Note that depending or enforcing some kind of jiffies granularity is
*particularly* bad, because it's basically a random value.

It will depend on architecture and on configuration. On some
architectures it's a fixed value (some have it at 100, which is, I
think, the original x86 case), on others it's "configurable", but not
really (ie alpha is "configurable" in our Kconfig, but the _hardware_
typically has a fixed clock tick at 1024 Hz, but then there are
platforms that are different, and then there's Qemu that likes a lower
frequency to avoid overhead etc etc).

And then we have the "modern default", which is to ask the user at
config time if they want a 100 / 250 / 300 / 1000 HZ value, and the
actual hw clock tick may be much more dynamic than that.

Anyway, what I'm saying is just that we should *not* limit granularity
to anything that has to do with jiffies. Yes, that's still a real
thing in that it's a "cheap read of the current time", but it should
never be seen as any kind of vfs granularity.

And yes, HZ will be in the "roughly 100-1000" range, so if we're
talking granularities that are microseconds or finer, then at most
you'll have rounding issues - and since any HZ rounding issues should
only be for the cases where we set the time to "now" - rounding
shouldn't be an issue anyway, since it's not a time that is specified
by user space.

End result: try to avoid anything to do with HZ in filesystem code,
unless it's literally about jiffies (which should typically be mostly
about any timeouts a filesystem may have, not about timestamps
themselves).

               Linus