This makes the assumption that atime is not used, which may be true on your
system but isn't on others. I regularly move data between faster and slower
storage based on atime, and promote reactivated projects to something faster,
while retiring inactive project data elsewhere. Other admins use it to identify
unused files which are candidates for backup to offline media or the bit bucket.
Let people who want that behavior specify it for existing filesystems, if you
want to remove functionality from ext4 or btrfs or some thing place where people
have no existing expectations, I still think it's wrong, but I couldn't say I
think it might break anything.
I did a patch a few years ago which only updated atime on open and write, and
that worked about as well as relatime, the inode update on open is cheap, the
head is already there, and it was only slightly slower than noatime. The were no
programs which kept files open for days and just read them. The the only storage
hierarchy was "slow and cheap." ;-)
--
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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