Kernel prepatch 6.6-rc3

[Posted September 25, 2023 by corbet]

The third 6.6 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

Unusually, we have a large chunk of changes in filesystems. Part of it is the vfs-level revert of some of the timestamp handling that needs to soak a bit more, and part of it is some xfs fixes. With a few other filesystem fixes too.

The multi-grain timestamp changes turned out to cause the occasional regression (timestamps that could appear to go backward) and were taken back out.

Kernel prepatch 6.6-rc3

Posted Sep 26, 2023 18:35 UTC (Tue) by jlayton (subscriber, #31672) [Link]

To be clear: the problem wasn't that the timestamps would go backward, but rather that it was possible for a file to get a fine-grained timestamp update, and then for a different file to get a coarse-grained update. That could make it appear that they were modified in reverse order, which has implications for things like make, rsync, etc.

This may be fixable with a slightly different design, but I need to prototype that out to see whether it's feasible.