The field gets populated (see below) only coreutils stat does not display it. Apparently they're waiting1 for the xstat() interface.
coreutils patches - aug. 2012 - TODO
stat(1) and ls(1) support for birth time. Dependent on xstat() being provided by the kernel
You can get the creation time via debugfs:
debugfs -R 'stat <inode_number>' DEVICE
e.g. for my /etc/profile which is on /dev/sda2 (see How to find out what device a file is on):
stat -c %i /etc/profile 398264
debugfs -R 'stat <398264>' /dev/sda2
debugfs 1.42.5 (29-Jul-2012)
Inode: 398264 Type: regular Mode: 0644 Flags: 0x80000
Generation: 2058737571 Version: 0x00000000:00000001
User: 0 Group: 0 Size: 562
File ACL: 0 Directory ACL: 0
Links: 1 Blockcount: 8
Fragment: Address: 0 Number: 0 Size: 0
ctime: 0x506b860b:19fa3c34 -- Wed Oct 3 02:25:47 2012
atime: 0x50476677:dcd84978 -- Wed Sep 5 16:49:27 2012
mtime: 0x506b860b:19fa3c34 -- Wed Oct 3 02:25:47 2012
crtime: 0x50476677:dcd84978 -- Wed Sep 5 16:49:27 2012
Size of extra inode fields: 28
EXTENTS:
(0):3308774
Time fields meaning:
ctime: file change time.atime: file access time.mtime: file modification time.crtime: file creation time.
1 Linus' reply on LKML thread
