Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org> says:
The VFS has always used coarse-grained timestamps when updating the
ctime and mtime after a change. This has the benefit of allowing
filesystems to optimize away a lot metadata updates, down to around 1
per jiffy, even when a file is under heavy writes.
Unfortunately, this has always been an issue when we're exporting via
NFSv3, which relies on timestamps to validate caches. A lot of changes
can happen in a jiffy, so timestamps aren't sufficient to help the
client decide when to invalidate the cache. Even with NFSv4, a lot of
exported filesystems don't properly support a change attribute and are
subject to the same problems with timestamp granularity. Other
applications have similar issues with timestamps (e.g backup
applications).
If we were to always use fine-grained timestamps, that would improve the
situation, but that becomes rather expensive, as the underlying
filesystem would have to log a lot more metadata updates.
What we need is a way to only use fine-grained timestamps when they are
being actively queried. Use the (unused) top bit in inode->i_ctime_nsec
as a flag that indicates whether the current timestamps have been
queried via stat() or the like. When it's set, we allow the kernel to
use a fine-grained timestamp iff it's necessary to make the ctime show
a different value.
This solves the problem of being able to distinguish the timestamp
between updates, but introduces a new problem: it's now possible for a
file being changed to get a fine-grained timestamp. A file that is
altered just a bit later can then get a coarse-grained one that appears
older than the earlier fine-grained time. This violates timestamp
ordering guarantees.
To remedy this, keep a global monotonic atomic64_t value that acts as a
timestamp floor. When we go to stamp a file, we first get the latter of
the current floor value and the current coarse-grained time. If the
inode ctime hasn't been queried then we just attempt to stamp it with
that value.
If it has been queried, then first see whether the current coarse time
is later than the existing ctime. If it is, then we accept that value.
If it isn't, then we get a fine-grained time and try to swap that into
the global floor. Whether that succeeds or fails, we take the resulting
floor time, convert it to realtime and try to swap that into the ctime.
We take the result of the ctime swap whether it succeeds or fails, since
either is just as valid.
Filesystems can opt into this by setting the FS_MGTIME fstype flag.
Others should be unaffected (other than being subject to the same floor
value as multigrain filesystems).
* patches from https://lore.kernel.org/r/20241002-mgtime-v10-0-d1c4717f5284@kernel.org:
tmpfs: add support for multigrain timestamps
btrfs: convert to multigrain timestamps
ext4: switch to multigrain timestamps
xfs: switch to multigrain timestamps
Documentation: add a new file documenting multigrain timestamps
fs: add percpu counters for significant multigrain timestamp events
fs: tracepoints around multigrain timestamp events
fs: handle delegated timestamps in setattr_copy_mgtime
fs: have setattr_copy handle multigrain timestamps appropriately
fs: add infrastructure for multigrain timestamps
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20241002-mgtime-v10-0-d1c4717f5284@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
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