Re: [PATCH] nanosecond resolution for stat(2)

[Andi Kleen]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 08:57:32PM +0200, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Andi Kleen wrote:
> > 
> > Some drivers (like mouse drivers or tty) do dubious inode [mac] time 
> > accesses of the on disk inode and without even marking it dirty. This is 
> > likely a bug.
> 
> No, it is intentional. At least some versions of "w" (maybe all) will use
> the tty access times to judge how long the tty has been idle. The point is
> that this is all information that is interesting (and useful), but not
> worth sending to disk - it is useful only as long as the inode remains
> locked in-core for other reasons, ie being in use.
> 
> (It's not only "not worth it" to send to disk, but it would be positively 
> wrong to even _try_ updating the disk with the access times, since we want 
> these things to work even with a read-only /dev).

Ok. But it is surely not needed for mouse drivers, isn't it ? 
(I removed a few updates in them) 

I didn't change tty in this regard anyways.

Would you consider to merge the patch ? 

-Andi