3 ms·
> disabling the writing of 'last accessed' timestamps atime is the most useless filesystem feature I’ve heard of. But on most Unix-like systems it’s enabled by
by GrumpySloth 3y ago
> disabling the writing of 'last accessed' timestamps
atime is the most useless filesystem feature I’ve heard of. But on most Unix-like systems it’s enabled by default and the main thing it does is turn reads into writes, degrading performance. All the while ctime isn’t a standard Unix filesystem feature. And ctime to me always seemed infinitely more useful (and cheaper!) than atime.
</rant>
- yencabulator 3y agorelatime has been the Linux default since 2009. It makes that be one write per 24 hours.
- mischief6 3y agowhile it is unfortunate it requires a write, it is useful in some cases. for example, finding old objects in a cache, or today i used it to find out what firmware my kernel is loading by checking atime of /lib/firmware.
- mike_hock 3y agoSo it's useful as a debugging feature that you might want to briefly turn on once every decade. Finding old objects in a cache is an issue specific to caches and should be implemented there.
- cromka 3y agoFor the latter you could enable it, reboot and get the same information right away, then disable it?
- mischief6 3y agoi did not see a clear list of all firmware files read by the kernel in dmesg, so the find/atime trick worked well.