Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Replacing Atime With Relatime in the Kernel

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the results-apparently-too-much-to-ask-for dept.

eldavojohn writes "Our friend Jeremy at the Kernal Trap has dug up some interesting criticism of atime from Linus Torvalds. As Linus submitted patches to improve relatime he noted: 'I cannot over-emphasize how much of a deal it is in practice. Atime updates are by far the biggest IO performance deficiency that Linux has today. Getting rid of atime updates would give us more everyday Linux performance than all the pagecache speedups of the past 10 years, _combined_.' And later severely beat atime about the head with a pointed stick: 'It's also perhaps the most stupid Unix design idea of all times. Unix is really nice and well done, but think about this a bit: 'For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a ... write to the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we read from the cache ... do a write to the disk!'" Well, I guess I can expect my Linux machine to become a little bit faster!"

3 of 416 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ummm.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    I'm not quite sure why Linux hasn't followed suit by now. Perhaps if you knew the first thing about Linux, you'd know that it has had this option - for at least the last 10 years.

    But don't let the complete lack of knowlege on a particular topic stop you from posting about it.
  2. Re:Ummm.. by sholden · · Score: 0, Troll

    So you committed to it not having it, even though you weren't sure and vaguely though it might? "I'm not quite sure why Linux hasn't followed suit by now" is declaring that Linux hasn't followed suit.

  3. Re:Ummm.. by sholden · · Score: 0, Troll

    The commitment was in the part I quoted. That's why I quoted it.

    I disagree, the title is pretty much a give away as to whether linux has atime or not.