Re: [PATCH 01/10] fs: turn inode ctime fields into a single ktime_t

On Tue, Jul 02, 2024 at 11:58:02AM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:

Yeah, mostly. We shrink struct inode by 8 bytes with that patch, and we
(probably) get a better cache footprint, since i_version ends up in the
same cacheline as the ctime. That's really a separate issue though, so
I'm not too worked up about dropping that patch.

As a bonus, leaving it split across separate fields means that we can
use unused bits in the nsec field for the flag, so we don't need to
sacrifice any timestamp granularity either.

I've got a draft rework that does this that I'm testing now. Assuming
it works OK, I'll resend in a few days.

So while shrinking the inodes sounds nice, the tradeoff to have to
check all timestamps from disk / the server for validity doesn't
sound as positive.  So I'm glade we're avoiding this at least for.