> Yes, this will make msync(MS_ASYNC) more heavyweight again. But if an > application doesn't want to update the timestamps, it should just omit > this call, since it does nothing else.
Er... FWIW, I have an application that makes heavy use of msync(MS_ASYNC) and doesn't care about timestamps. (In fact, sometimes it's configured to write to a raw device and there are no timestamps.) It's used as a poor man's portable async I/O. The application logs data to disk, and sometimes needs to sync it to disk to ensure it has all been written. To reduce long pauses when doing msync(MS_SYNC), it does msync(MS_ASYNC) as soon as a page is filled up to prompt asynchronous writeback. "I'm done writing this page and don't intend to write it again. Please start committing it to stable storage, but don't block me." Then, occasionally, there's an msync(MS_SYNC) call to be sure the data is synced to disk. This caused annoying hiccups before the MS_ASYNC calls were added. I agree that msync(MS_ASYNC) has no semantics if time is ignored. But it's a useful way to tell the OS that the page is not going to be dirtied again. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
