Being standards compliant is not an argument it's a design goal, a
requirement. Standards compliance is like pregant, you are or you're
not. And to deliberately ignore standards for speed is saying "it's too
hard to do it right, I'll do it wrong and it will be faster." The answer
is to do it smarter, with solutions like relatime (which can be enhanced
as Linus noted) which provide performance benefits without ignoring
standards, or use of a filesystem which does a better job. But when it
goes in the kernel the choice of having per-filesystem behavior either
vanishes or becomes an exercise in complex and as-yet unwritten mount
options.
There are certainly ways to improve ext3, not journaling atime updates
would certainly be one, less frequent updates of dirty inodes, whatever.
But if a user wants to give up standards compliance it should be a
deliberate choice, not something which the average user will not
understand or learn to do.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
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