Re: NODIRATIME patch for 2.1.75

Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.CSIRO.AU)
Mon, 22 Dec 1997 20:52:34 +1100


Linus Torvalds writes:
>
> On Mon, 22 Dec 1997, Richard Gooch wrote:
> > OK, how about I send a patch which redoes this using the generic VFS
> > layer and also rips out the NOATIME stuff in the ext2 layer?
>
> That would be much more likely to please me. I'd still like to see that it
> gets some testing and comments from people on the mailing list first, but
> I'd like to see it..

Well, looking closer, I note that the ext flag variants are not really
used for anything but setting the VFS flags. I don't think we can get
rid of the reference in fs/ext2/ioctl.c since that would break
programmes relying on the ioctl() to change the inode flags. Unless
you feel like breaking them ;-)

The other reference to the ext2-specific flags is in fs/ext2/inode.c
ext2_read_inode() where the ext2-specific i_flags are checked and VFS
i_flags are set as appropriate. I don't see anything in the kernel
which actually sets the EXT2_NOATIME_FL ext2-specific i_flags. Perhaps
this can be set via the ext2fs utilities? Otherwise I don't see the
point of that code.

Can someone please tell me why we need those ATTR_FLAG_* flags as
well? We seem to have the same/similar information in 3 places:

inode->u.ext2_i.i_flags
inode->i_attr_flags
inode->i_flags

Regards,

Richard....