I noticed a strange behavior in a tmpfs file system the other day, while
building packages - occasionally, and seemingly at random, make decided to
rebuild a target. However, only on tmpfs.

A file would be created, and if checked, it had a sub-second timestamp.
However, after an utimes related call where sub-seconds should be set, they
were zeroed instead. In the case that a file was created, and utimes(...,NULL)
was used on it in the same second, the timestamp on the file moved backwards.

After some digging, I found that this was being caused by tmpfs not having a
time granularity set, thus inheriting the default 1 second granularity.

Hugh adds: yes, we missed tmpfs when the s_time_gran mods went into 2.6.11.
Unfortunately, the granularity of CURRENT_TIME, often used in filesystems,
does not match the default granularity set by alloc_super.  A few more such
discrepancies have been found, but this is the most important to fix now.
Signed-off-by: Robin H. Johnson <robbat2@gentoo.org>
Acked-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>