On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 10:06:04AM +1100, Daniel Carosone wrote:
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 09:23:56PM +0000, Andrew Doran wrote:
I didn't phrase that very well. I mean if you only read a file but never
dirty it, the atime update won't go out until unmount. Since writing the
original mail I learned that sync() won't even push it. This is now fixed.
The same issue also affected device nodes.
This was deliberate; at the time it was a way to avoid spinning up
disks on laptops, just for atime updates.
We could use a runtime check to determine whether or not the system should
conserve energy. For 5.0 I think the writing them is the lesser of two
evils.