[RFC][PATCH 0/6] Enhanced file stat system call

[Steve French]

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:46 AM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de> wrote:
> On Friday 29 April 2016 13:57:36 David Howells wrote:
>> struct statx *buffer);
>>
>> This is an enhanced file stat function that provides a number of useful
>> features, in summary:
>>
>> (1) More information: creation time, data version number, inode
generation
>> number and flags. A subset of these is available through a number of
>> filesystems (such as CIFS, NFS, AFS, Ext4 and BTRFS).
>>
>
> I have a question about birthtime/creationtime: As we are gaining a way
> to read this, should we also provide a way to update it using a new
variant
> of the utimensat syscall in order to have 'cp -a' create an identical
copy,
> or is the idea that this is defined as the time that is particular copy
> of the inode was created?
>
> I've discussed this with Deepa in the past, as she is driving the
> convertion of the inode timestamps to timespec64 now, and we will
> need a new version of utimensat for her work as well. I can see good
> reasons either way (allowing updates of btime or disallowing them).

It would help interop with Windows (and presumably Mac) if birth time can
be updated
-- 
Thanks,

Steve