Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 6 Jun 1996 13:53:47 +0300 (EET DST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: No atime |
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> Date: Thu, 6 Jun 96 00:13 BST > From: Jamie Lokier <jamie@rebellion.co.uk> > > Another possibility is to not mark inodes dirty just because the atime > field changes. Or mark them dirty in such a way that they don't need to > get written out until the filesystem is unmounted. This would stop > those laptop disks from spinning and probably be Posix compliant too (as > long as the system is running). > > Stephen and I talked about doing this very thing at the Berlin Linux > conference. I think this is something you can expect to see in the 2.1 > development cycle.
Umm. I actually _implemented_ it in something like five minutes, but decided we don't want to have that kind of change just before 2.0...
The problem with the approach is that when you don't write them out, you end up with them in memory taking up space, and then the "get_free_inode()" thing might become much less efficient. So you have to flush them even at other times than just unmount, and I never actually even bothered to reboot with my patches in place, because this is exactly the kind of subtle problem that I _don't_ want to introduce right now..
Linus
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