Re: Apparent backward time travel in timestamps on file creation

[David Howells]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The "is it in sync with gettimeofday()" is interesting too, even if
> the answer is that you don't expect it to be _perfectly_ in sync. A
> test that just reports maximum slop might be an interesting test, and
> could show real problems (maybe bad network time synchronization, but
> maybe actual bugs in our internal xtime handling even for local
> filesystems!).

I wonder if multi-cpu systems might show interesting differences between CPUs
too.  I would hope not since xtime is based on a global variable.

> And then if your tool starts reporting times that are off by seconds
> or minutes, people might say "Hey, that's not right.." and find
> something.

More likely never see it as the output is hidden away by xfstests.  Probably
xfstests needs to gain some way of lending prominence to information of this
type.

David