[Gluster-Maintainers] Release 5: New option noatime

[Shyam Ranganathan]

On 09/27/2018 09:08 AM, Shyam Ranganathan wrote:
> Writing this to solicit opinions on merging this [1] change that
> introduces an option late in the release cycle.
> 
> I went through the code, and most changes are standard option handling
> and basic xlator scaffolding, other than the change in posix xlator code
> that handles the flag to not set atime and the code in utime xlator that
> conditionally sets the flag. (of which IMO the latter is more important
> than the former, as posix is just acting on the flag).
> 
> The option if enabled would hence not update atime for the following
> FOPs, opendir, open, read, and would continue updating atime on the
> following FOPs fallocate and zerofill (which also update mtime, so the
> AFR self heal on time change would kick in anyways).
> 
> As the option suggests, with it enables atime is almost meaningless and
> hence it almost does not matter where we update it and where not. Just
> considering the problem where atime changes cause AFR to trigger a heal,
> and the FOPs above that strictly only change atime handled with this
> option, I am looking at this as functionally workable.
> 
> So IMO we can accept this even though it is late, but would like to hear
> from others if this needs to be deferred till release-6.
> 
> Shyam

[1] Patch under review: https://review.gluster.org/c/glusterfs/+/21281