On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 09:49:39AM +0100, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:

quoted

How about somethign like "This mount significantly reduces writes
needed to update the inode's timestamps, especially mtime and actime.

What is "actime" in the preceding line? Should it be "ctime"?

Sorry, no, it should be "atime".

I find the wording of there a little confusing. Is the following 
a correct rewrite:

    The advantage of MS_STRICTATIME | MS_LAZYTIME is that stat(2)
    will return the correctly updated atime, but the atime updates
    will be flushed to disk only when (1) the inode needs to be 
    updated for filesystem / data consistency reasons or (2) the 
    inode is pushed out of memory, or (3) the filesystem is 
    unmounted.)

Yes, that's correct.  The only other thing I might add is that in the
case of a crash, the atime (or mtime) fields on disk might be out of
date by at most 24 hours.

						- Ted