Atime and btrfs: a bad combination?

My real point (which your comment echoes) was that atime is so different than just about anything else, that if you want to keep it, it really deserves to be treated rather differently than everything else also. And, as the example in the article shows, atime can have real negative consequences even if you largely ignore it most of the time.

It seems to me the other option, if you don't fix atime, is to mitigate it with hacks (relatime -- which doesn't work well for the attack against btrfs shown in the article) or outright disable it everywhere or almost everywhere.

My comment above was perhaps slightly over the top. Sorry for any confusion.

> I don't use it a lot, but I certainly do use it from time to time to see what files are being accessed. Not a killer feature, but a valuable one.

Hah. I disable ataime on all my filesystems and the only use I have for it is a side effect: it functions as creation time, which is much more valuable for me than access time :)