Re: [PATCH 2/2] block: create ioctl to discard-or-zeroout a range of blocks

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 11:52 PM, Gregory Farnum [off-list ref] wrote:

I wasn't really involved in this stuff but I gather from looking at
http://www.spinics.net/lists/xfs/msg36869.html that any durability
command other than fdatasync is going to write out the mtime updates
to the inodes on disk. Given our durability requirements and the
guarantees offered about when things actually hit disk, that doesn't
work for us.

Fair enough. Yes, the lazytime thing doesn't help if you actually sync
the file explicitly, then you'd really do need something like NOMTIME
in order to not dirty the inode itself at all (together with
preallocation - otherwise the inode will be dirty due to the block
allocation updates).

             Linus