The current Lustre network protocol has support for a 64-bit timestamp of seconds, but does not have a field for passing the nanosecond timestamp from clients to servers and back again.

It would be relatively straight-forward to put 3x __u32 nanosecond timestamps in the reserved fields in struct obdo and struct mdt_body. These fields are currently always initialized to 0, so there wouldn't even need to be a protocol change or feature to begin using these fields for nanoseconds - just copy them in/out of the RPC structures, and old clients/servers will just store 0 there, and ignore any nanosecond timestamps that are sent to them (no differently than they do today).

It is more complex to add the nanosecond timestamps to struct ost_lvb, which is most commonly used for glimpse locks (stat) on OST objects. This will require a structure change to fit the extra 3x __u32 nanosecond timestamps into ost_lvb, which may require a protocol change. It may be possible if this structure is passed in a separate ptlrpc message buffer that the larger size will be ignored by older clients, which would avoid the need for additional complexity for interoperability.