On Wed, 4 Jun 2014, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

On Tuesday 03 June 2014, Dave Chinner wrote:

quoted

Just ot be pedantic, inodes don't need 96 bit timestamps - some
filesystems can *support up to* 96 bit timestamps. If the kernel
only supports 64 bit timestamps and that's all the kernel can
represent, then the upper bits of the 96 bit on-disk inode
timestamps simply remain zero.

I meant the reverse: since we have file systems that can store
96-bit timestamps when using 64-bit kernels, we need to extend
32-bit kernels to have the same internal representation so we
can actually read those file systems correctly.

quoted

If you move the filesystem between kernels with different time
ranges, then the filesystem needs to be able to tell the kernel what
it's supported range is.  This is where having the VFS limit the
range of supported timestamps is important: the limit is the
min(kernel range, filesystem range). This allows the filesystems
to be indepenent of the kernel time representation, and the kernel
to be independent of the physical filesystem time encoding....

I agree it makes sense to let the kernel know about the limits
of the file system it accesses, but for the reverse, we're probably
better off just making the kernel representation large enough (i.e.
96 bits) so it can work with any known file system.

Depends...  96 bit handling may get prohibitive on 32-bit archs.

The important point here is for the kernel to be able to represent the 
time _range_ used by any known filesystem, not necessarily the time 
_precision_.

For example, a 64 bit representation can be made of 40 bits for seconds 
spanning 34865 years, and 24 bits for fractional seconds providing 
precision down to 60 nanosecs.  That ought to be plenty good on 32 bit 
systems while still being cheap to handle.


Nicolas

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