[PATCH] inotify

inotify is intended to correct the deficiencies of dnotify, particularly
its inability to scale and its terrible user interface:

        * dnotify requires the opening of one fd per each directory
          that you intend to watch. This quickly results in too many
          open files and pins removable media, preventing unmount.
        * dnotify is directory-based. You only learn about changes to
          directories. Sure, a change to a file in a directory affects
          the directory, but you are then forced to keep a cache of
          stat structures.
        * dnotify's interface to user-space is awful.  Signals?

inotify provides a more usable, simple, powerful solution to file change
notification:

        * inotify's interface is a system call that returns a fd, not SIGIO.
	  You get a single fd, which is select()-able.
        * inotify has an event that says "the filesystem that the item
          you were watching is on was unmounted."
        * inotify can watch directories or files.

Inotify is currently used by Beagle (a desktop search infrastructure),
Gamin (a FAM replacement), and other projects.

See Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt.

Signed-off-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Cc: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This commit is contained in:
Robert Love
2005-07-12 17:06:03 -04:00
committed by Linus Torvalds
parent bd4c625c06
commit 0eeca28300
24 changed files with 1639 additions and 67 deletions

View File

@@ -16,6 +16,7 @@
#include <linux/eventpoll.h>
#include <linux/mount.h>
#include <linux/cdev.h>
#include <linux/fsnotify.h>
/* sysctl tunables... */
struct files_stat_struct files_stat = {
@@ -126,6 +127,8 @@ void fastcall __fput(struct file *file)
struct inode *inode = dentry->d_inode;
might_sleep();
fsnotify_close(file);
/*
* The function eventpoll_release() should be the first called
* in the file cleanup chain.