Edgar Fuß <[email protected]> writes: >> Honestly, I think atime is one of the dumbest thing ever. > We occasionally use them to find out (or have a first guess at): > -- has anyone used libfoobar last year? > -- who uses kbaz, i.e. has /home/xyz/.config/kbaz.conf been accessed? > > We use snapshots to run backups, so atimes are not touched by them.
I fairly often look at atimes to find out if old libraries have been used, and various other things. I have also had a test that tried to use utime fail on a machine that was noatime. So the notion that noatime should mean what it does now, but allow explicit writes sounds good. I don't see any value in changing the naming of the flags. Having a fs write atime updates unless mounted noatime seems fine, and if people want noatime that's easy. I would be opposed to e.g. dropping the noatime option, making noatime default, and adding an atime option. That's just churn violating historical norms for no good reason. There's a question of what the default for installs should be, and I don't have a real opinion about that. It would be good to have stats about writes, separately including atime updates. Right now we know it causes writes but I haven't seen data.
