We first tried to avoid updating atime/mtime entirely (commit
b0de59b573: "TTY: do not update atime/mtime on read/write"), and then
limited it to only update it occasionally (commit 37b7f3c765: "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@hostway.ca>
Acked-by: Jiri Slaby <jslaby@suse.cz>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
b0b885657b