[PATCH] relative atime

Add "relatime" (relative atime) support.  Relative atime only updates the
atime if the previous atime is older than the mtime or ctime.  Like
noatime, but useful for applications like mutt that need to know when a
file has been read since it was last modified.

A corresponding patch against mount(8) is available at
http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/mount-relative-atime.txt

Signed-off-by: Valerie Henson <val_henson@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Mark Fasheh <mark.fasheh@oracle.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 18 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/fs/inode.c b/fs/inode.c
index 04536ebc5ac4..bf21dc6d0dbd 100644
--- a/fs/inode.c
+++ b/fs/inode.c
@@ -1177,13 +1177,27 @@ void touch_atime(struct vfsmount *mnt, struct dentry *dentry)
 			return;
 		if ((mnt->mnt_flags & MNT_NODIRATIME) && S_ISDIR(inode->i_mode))
 			return;
+
+		if (mnt->mnt_flags & MNT_RELATIME) {
+			/*
+			 * With relative atime, only update atime if the
+			 * previous atime is earlier than either the ctime or
+			 * mtime.
+			 */
+			if (timespec_compare(&inode->i_mtime,
+						&inode->i_atime) < 0 &&
+			    timespec_compare(&inode->i_ctime,
+						&inode->i_atime) < 0)
+				return;
+		}
 	}
 
 	now = current_fs_time(inode->i_sb);
-	if (!timespec_equal(&inode->i_atime, &now)) {
-		inode->i_atime = now;
-		mark_inode_dirty_sync(inode);
-	}
+	if (timespec_equal(&inode->i_atime, &now))
+		return;
+
+	inode->i_atime = now;
+	mark_inode_dirty_sync(inode);
 }
 EXPORT_SYMBOL(touch_atime);