Commit Graph

3 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Amy Griffis
0edce197db [PATCH] inotify (5/5): update kernel documentation
Update kernel documentation to include a description of the inotify
kernel API.

Signed-off-by: Amy Griffis <amy.griffis@hp.com>
Acked-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Acked-by: John McCutchan <john@johnmccutchan.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2006-06-20 05:25:19 -04:00
Robert Love
6f97933d0f [PATCH] inotify: documentation update
Clean up and expand some of the inotify documentation.

Signed-off-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2005-07-15 09:54:51 -07:00
Robert Love
0eeca28300 [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>
2005-07-12 20:38:38 -07:00