[ 3.5.y.z extended stable ] Patch "tty: fix up atime/mtime mess, take three" has been added to staging queue

[Luis Henriques]

This is a note to let you know that I have just added a patch titled

    tty: fix up atime/mtime mess, take three

to the linux-3.5.y-queue branch of the 3.5.y.z extended stable tree 
which can be found at:

 http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/linux.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/linux-3.5.y-queue

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to this tree, please 
reply to this email.

For more information about the 3.5.y.z tree, see
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Dev/ExtendedStable

Thanks.
-Luis

------

>From 42f6ea8ae0badca0bdef8a60ca18a34fc323822f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds at linux-foundation.org>
Date: Wed, 1 May 2013 07:32:21 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] tty: fix up atime/mtime mess, take three

commit b0b885657b6c8ef63a46bc9299b2a7715d19acde upstream.

We first tried to avoid updating atime/mtime entirely (commit
b0de59b5733d: "TTY: do not update atime/mtime on read/write"), and then
limited it to only update it occasionally (commit 37b7f3c76595: "TTY:
fix atime/mtime regression"), but it turns out that this was both
insufficient and overkill.

It was insufficient because we let people attach to the shared ptmx node
to see activity without even reading atime/mtime, and it was overkill
because the "only once a minute" means that you can't really tell an
idle person from an active one with 'w'.

So this tries to fix the problem properly.  It marks the shared ptmx
node as un-notifiable, and it lowers the "only once a minute" to a few
seconds instead - still long enough that you can't time individual
keystrokes, but short enough that you can tell whether somebody is
active or not.

Reported-by: Simon Kirby <sim at hostway.ca>
Acked-by: Jiri Slaby <jslaby at suse.cz>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh at linuxfoundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds at linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Luis Henriques <luis.henriques at canonical.com>
---
 drivers/tty/pty.c    | 3 +++
 drivers/tty/tty_io.c | 4 ++--
 2 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/drivers/tty/pty.c b/drivers/tty/pty.c
index ce53594..33b1526 100644
--- a/drivers/tty/pty.c
+++ b/drivers/tty/pty.c
@@ -616,6 +616,9 @@ static int ptmx_open(struct inode *inode, struct file *filp)

 	nonseekable_open(inode, filp);

+	/* We refuse fsnotify events on ptmx, since it's a shared resource */
+	filp->f_mode |= FMODE_NONOTIFY;
+
 	retval = tty_alloc_file(filp);
 	if (retval)
 		return retval;
diff --git a/drivers/tty/tty_io.c b/drivers/tty/tty_io.c
index 95a37fa..67ea9cf 100644
--- a/drivers/tty/tty_io.c
+++ b/drivers/tty/tty_io.c
@@ -939,10 +939,10 @@ void start_tty(struct tty_struct *tty)

 EXPORT_SYMBOL(start_tty);

+/* We limit tty time update visibility to every 8 seconds or so. */
 static void tty_update_time(struct timespec *time)
 {
-	unsigned long sec = get_seconds();
-	sec -= sec % 60;
+	unsigned long sec = get_seconds() & ~7;
 	if ((long)(sec - time->tv_sec) > 0)
 		time->tv_sec = sec;
 }
--
1.8.1.2