Ext4 with relatime mount option. Access to file e.g.: /home/armin/documents/abc (file) does lead into the following: The access time of the /home directory is not changed, but should be.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that the access time of all parent directories should be changed, but that isn't how POSIX works. Only the access time of the file will be modified, otherwise there would be a huge amount of overhead (e.g. maybe dozens of disk writes) for every file access. Also, most filesystems have no way of determining the parent directories for a given file, and there may be multiple parent directories for a single file (hard links), and it wouldn't make sense to update all of those directories, so this is also impractical to implement for most filesystems. People have enough problems with atime without making it even more expensive, and relatime is already reducing the number of cases where atime is updated significantly. Seems I cannot close this bug (Ted, can you give me permission for this?), but it should be closed as "not a bug".
I thought it would be a good idea to change this behaviour.
I think, only symbolic links should be used. The parent directory is given by the directory tree itself. Stored in a tree.
Andreas, I don't have access to change the access controls. We need to ask the bugzilla.kernel.org admins to add you to the appropriate ACL.
The additional write amount is not so big as expected.
Just backtrace the directory tree. Modern firesystems use trees for storing the directory information.