How I fixed UNIX atime! With 10 lines of code and feminism!!!
summary
Fixes UNIX atime by asking a simpler question: is the last read time newer than the last write time, and skip updating if not, with a 24‑hour fallback for cleanup-sensitive files. Implementation lands as a mount option and a tiny kernel change — roughly 10 lines of code in core plus tool support — called relative atime, upstreamed around 2009, and credited with avoiding billions of disk writes in real deployments.
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