Messages in this thread | | | Date | 24 Sep 2002 08:51:00 +0200 | From | (Kai Henningsen) | Subject | Re: [PATCH] nanosecond resolution for stat(2) |
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torvalds@transmeta.com (Linus Torvalds) wrote on 23.09.02 in <Pine.LNX.4.33.0209231154520.3512-100000@penguin.transmeta.com>:
> On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Andi Kleen wrote: > > > > Some drivers (like mouse drivers or tty) do dubious inode [mac] time > > accesses of the on disk inode and without even marking it dirty. This is > > likely a bug. > > No, it is intentional. At least some versions of "w" (maybe all) will use > the tty access times to judge how long the tty has been idle. The point is > that this is all information that is interesting (and useful), but not > worth sending to disk - it is useful only as long as the inode remains > locked in-core for other reasons, ie being in use. > > (It's not only "not worth it" to send to disk, but it would be positively > wrong to even _try_ updating the disk with the access times, since we want > these things to work even with a read-only /dev).
Should there perhaps be a special function for this - say device_atime_update_nowrite() or something like that, to make it clearer what happens? You could put something like you just wrote as a comment before that function ...
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