ext4 - getting at birth time (file create time) and getting/setting nanosecond time stamps and utime

[Andreas Dilger]

On 19-Oct-09, at 13:45, Steve French wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Andreas Dilger <adilger at sun.com>  
> wrote:
>> I had proposed in the past that these file attributes be exposed to
>> userspace as virtual xattrs, e.g. user.cr_time returning a struct
>> timespec, but the data is stored internal to the filesystem in  
>> whatever
>> format is most efficient for it.  We only strictly need user.crtime
>> for this, but I wouldn't object to exporting other inode attributes  
>> in
>> this way (e.g. user.mtime, user.atime, etc).
>
> Yes - the fake xattr approach was the approach that I preferred
> (since I could do this trivially to cifs, and for ext4 it seems  
> equally easy),
> but I wonder if this "path based" approach is slightly harder for  
> Samba,
> since for most cases Samba maps to "handle based" equivalents
> (when the same operation can come in eitherpath based or
> handle based - Samba mostly maps to handle based).

Could you please elaborate what you mean by "path based" for xattrs?
They can be gotten with sys_fgetxattr() from a file handle just as
easily as from the filename.

I definitely agree with having a common attribute name for these.

As for being able to write to the "create time" attribute, I would  
prefer
that this be a filesystem mount option.  For some users (myself  
included)
I don't care whether Windows is unhappy that it can't update this  
creation
time - I'd prefer to know when a file is actually created.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.