From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 Description of problem: The 2.6 kernel's buffer cache has sub-second resolution for file times. The ext3 file system does not. Consequently, the observable mtime for a file changes unpredictably. This is causing problems for us while compiling our product, because "make" relies on file modification times to determine what to compile. But the bug is easily observed without running make; see the steps below. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.9-1.678_FC3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. touch /tmp/foo 2. ls -l --full-time /tmp/foo 3. (reboot system) 4. ls -l --full-time /tmp/foo Actual Results: The visible file modification time changes (gets rounded down) as a result of the reboot. The rounding down happens whenever the kernel's buffer cache for the file gets flushed, which on an active system is essentially random. Expected Results: The file modification time should not change for a file which is not modified. Additional info: This was discussed on the linux-kernel mailing list back in April, but as far as I can tell it was never resolved: http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0404.0/0193.html And now it is causing a real problem for us. This is clearly a kernel bug; a file's modification time should not change unless the file is modified.
A fix for this was committed upstream on the 4th of January: ChangeSet.1.115, 2005-01-04 21:30:08-08:00, ak [PATCH] Sync in core time granuality with filesystems This patch corrects a problem that was originally added with the nanosecond timestamps in stat patch. The problem is that some file systems don't have enough space in their on disk inode to save nanosecond timestamps, so they truncate the c/a/mtime to seconds when flushing an dirty node. In core the inode would have full jiffies granuality.
fc3 won't get a 2.6.11 kernel until after its released, so a backport is probably a good idea for the interim.
An update has been released for Fedora Core 3 (kernel-2.6.12-1.1372_FC3) which may contain a fix for your problem. Please update to this new kernel, and report whether or not it fixes your problem. If you have updated to Fedora Core 4 since this bug was opened, and the problem still occurs with the latest updates for that release, please change the version field of this bug to 'fc4'. Thank you.