Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
© Zack Brown
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Tracking Inode Versioning
Just as the double slit experiment behaves one way when it's being watched, and another when it thinks it can get away with something, Jeff Layton suggested that Linux could get away with incrementing the inode version number only when some other part of the kernel was actually paying attention.
The inode version number (i_version in the inode structure) is generally incremented whenever the inode's metadata changes. Or, as Jeff explained, filesystems increment the version number whenever something happens that they care about. In the case of Btrfs, ext4, and XFS, they increment the version for file data changes as well. The problem with too much version change is that the inode has to be written back to disk each time, which can be slow on write-heavy operations.
Jeff believed he'd discovered that the only time the version number really mattered was when some other bit of code queried the inode. If there was no observer, there would be no need to keep the inode version precisely up to date. And, when an observer came along, that would be a good time for the inode to show it had been paying attention, by updating its version number.
[...]
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
LibreOffice Tested as Possible Office 365 Alternative
Another major organization has decided to test the possibility of migrating from Microsoft's Office 365 to LibreOffice.