> Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 18:31:26 -0400 (EDT)
> From: "Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>
>
> o Now perform `sync`. Every directory entry will be updated, causing
> an enormonous amount of wasted CPU cycles and disk activity!
> Sync should have done nothing. The disk was never written.
> If you execute `ls -R /`, the entire directory structure is again
> read from the physical media. Not nice.
>
> The ATIME updates dirty all the inodes.
>
> Later,
> David "Sparc" Miller
> davem@caip.rutgers.edu
>
Correct! Now, is a directory access a file access? I don't think it
should be. If it is, the new directory caching code was a lot of work
that will be wasted in real-world applications such as a compile using
`make`, etc. I think that only the directory "files" have been accessed,
not every file. 'ls -la --time=atime` shows every file on my disk as
having been accessed after `ls -R /`, which, in fact, has not happened.
Only the directory files have been accessed.
Cheers,
DJ
Richard B. Johnson
Analogic Corporation
Penguin : Linux version 2.1.55 on an i586 machine (66.15 BogoMips).
Warning : It's hard to stay on the trailing edge of technology.
Linux : Engineering tool
Spam : sync@localhost, daemon@loghost