file's access time should be updated when it gets executed. A while
ago the mechanism used to exec was changed to use a more mmap based
mechanism and this behavior was broken as a side-effect of that.
A new vnode flag is added that gets set when the file gets executed,
and the VOP_SETATTR() vnode operation gets called. The underlying
filesystem is expected to handle it based on its own semantics, some
filesystems don't support access time at all. Those that do should
handle it in a way that does not block, does not generate I/O if possible,
etc. In particular vn_start_write() has not been called. The UFS code
handles it the same way as it would normally handle the access time if
a file was read - the IN_ACCESS flag gets set in the inode but no other
action happens at this point. The actual time update will happen later
during a sync (which handles all the necessary locking).
Got me into this: cperciva
Discussed with: a lot with bde, a little with kan
Showed patches to: phk, jeffr, standards@, arch@
Minor discussion on: arch@
6341095e0d