Re: noatime on ufs2

Olivier Certner <olce@FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> Both the examples above prompt some straight objections on the current usefulness of "atime".  First, unless you've disabled building the locate database in cron (enabled by default, on a weekly basis), access times on directories lose most of their usefulness.  Second, if using an IDS, I'm afraid it's just game over.  And even if you think you are not, '460.pkg-checksum' at least is readily there to much complicate, or even prevent you from, getting package usage information this way (it is enabled by default, and on a daily basis).

I've often wished there was the ability to set a process to "noatime" - where
all accesses to the filesytem by the process and its children don't alter
atime. It would be handy for those cases you describe above, such as backups
and locate, but these days, where it matters, and is suitable, I instead
create a filesystem snapshot, and run the process on that instead. (which is
how "live" backups should be done anyway!)

Cheers, Jamie