David Howells [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

quoted

st_gen is
the inode generation number, st_btime is the file creation time, st_version
is the data version number (i_version),

Please define semantics for st_gen and st_version.

I've been asked to drop st_gen for security reasons.

I can't offhand think of a way to define st_version (or i_version, for that
matter) that would be consistent across all filesystems.  I would lean towards
"gets incremented monotonically by 1 for each data write operation committed,
but not for any metadata operations", but I'm fairly certain this won't jibe
with disk operations.

I meant disk filesystems that we have now, not disk operations.

David