Disabling atime

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sat Aug 11 16:48:25 UTC 2007


Miloslav Trmac wrote:

>>>> The minority here is having atime, hardly anyone ever uses it
>>>> compared to the cost of having it. It's easy to reenable it for the
>>>> few who really find it useful and want to pay for it.
>>> tmpwatch runs by default. Everyone uses that.
>> Has a simple patch already which I mentioned in my original mail.
> The patch changes behavior.
> 
> We're not in that much of a rush, are we?  Why don't we wait to see
> what, if any, relatime variant is committed to the upstream kernel?
> relatime design decisions will happen on lkml, not on this list.

I'd expect the RedHat-style approach to this to be: add some file under 
/etc/sysconfig like mount-options that contains options that can be 
merged with the ones in /etc/fstab and all of the magic automounting 
bits (this is probably as important on usb flash drives as anywhere).

This file might have sections for different fs types so you could apply 
appropriate settings, like read/write block sizes on all nfs mounts. It 
would be a nice touch if the mounting action would retry failing mounts 
without the options to recover from typos or options that conflict with 
ones specified in fstab, but since that could cause surprises itself it 
should be a setting within the file.

As usual, documentation for this file would be nice but optional.  A gui 
to manage it would be nice but optional. The file could be introduced in 
one fedora version with no default options but a choice to add noatime 
during the install.  Then in the next or some future version there would 
be more real-world experience about what default to use and you'd have 
an easy way to override the default in any case.  This is something that 
could be useful regardless of what the kernel does with relatime.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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