Updating the time for reads and writes

In the read sample above we did:

if (msg->i.nbytes > 0)
    ocb->attr->flags |= IOFUNC_ATTR_ATIME;

According to POSIX, if the read succeeds and the reader had asked for more than zero bytes, then the access time must be marked for update. But POSIX doesn't say that it must be updated right away. If you're doing many reads, you may not want to read the time from the kernel for every read. In the code above, we mark the time only as needing to be updated. When the next _IO_STAT or _IO_CLOSE_OCB message is processed, the resource manager library will see that the time needs to be updated and will get it from the kernel then. This of course has the disadvantage that the time is not the time of the read.

Similarly for the write sample above, we did:

if (msg->i.nbytes > 0)
    ocb->attr->flags |= IOFUNC_ATTR_MTIME | IOFUNC_ATTR_CTIME;

so the same thing will happen.

If you do want to have the times represent the read or write times, then after setting the flags you need only call the iofunc_time_update() helper function. So the read lines become:

if (msg->i.nbytes > 0) {
    ocb->attr->flags |= IOFUNC_ATTR_ATIME;
    iofunc_time_update(ocb->attr);
}

and the write lines become:

if (msg->i.nbytes > 0) {
    ocb->attr->flags |= IOFUNC_ATTR_MTIME | IOFUNC_ATTR_CTIME;
    iofunc_time_update(ocb->attr);
}

You should call iofunc_time_update() before you flush out any cached attributes. As a result of changing the time fields, the attribute structure will have the IOFUNC_ATTR_DIRTY_TIME bit set in the flags field, indicating that this field of the attribute must be updated when the attribute is flushed from the cache.