On Wed, Jun 27, 2007 at 10:04:56AM +1000, David Chinner wrote:

On Wed, Jun 27, 2007 at 12:59:08AM +0530, Amit K. Arora wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 12:14:00PM -0400, Andreas Dilger wrote:

quoted

On Jun 26, 2007  17:37 +0530, Amit K. Arora wrote:

quoted

I think, modifying ctime/mtime should be dependent on the other flags.
E.g., if we do not zero out data blocks on allocation/deallocation,
update only ctime. Otherwise, update ctime and mtime both.

I'm only being the advocate for requirements David Chinner has put
forward due to existing behaviour in XFS.  This is one of the reasons
why I think the "flags" mechanism we now have - we can encode the
various different behaviours in any way we want and leave it to the
caller.

I understand. May be we can confirm once more with David Chinner if this
is really required. Will it really be a compatibility issue if new XFS
preallocations (ie. via fallocate) update mtime/ctime?

It should be left up to the filesystem to decide. Only the
filesystem knows whether something changed and the timestamp should
or should not be updated.

Since Andreas had suggested FA_FL_NO_MTIME flag thinking it as a
requirement from XFS (whereas XFS does not need this flag), I don't think
we need to add this new flag.

Please let know if someone still feels FA_FL_NO_MTIME flag can be
useful.

--
Regards,
Amit Arora