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 updates the CFQ io scheduler to the new time sliced design (cfq
v3). It provides full process fairness, while giving excellent
aggregate system throughput even for many competing processes. It
supports io priorities, either inherited from the cpu nice value or set
directly with the ioprio_get/set syscalls. The latter closely mimic
set/getpriority.
This import is based on my latest from -mm.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This is the core of the (much simplified) early reclaim. The goal of this
patch is to reclaim some easily-freed pages from a zone before falling back
onto another zone.
One of the major uses of this is NUMA machines. With the default allocator
behavior the allocator would look for memory in another zone, which might be
off-node, before trying to reclaim from the current zone.
This adds a zone tuneable to enable early zone reclaim. It is selected on a
per-zone basis and is turned on/off via syscall.
Adding some extra throttling on the reclaim was also required (patch
4/4). Without the machine would grind to a crawl when doing a "make -j"
kernel build. Even with this patch the System Time is higher on
average, but it seems tolerable. Here are some numbers for kernbench
runs on a 2-node, 4cpu, 8Gig RAM Altix in the "make -j" run:
wall user sys %cpu ctx sw. sleeps
---- ---- --- ---- ------ ------
No patch 1009 1384 847 258 298170 504402
w/patch, no reclaim 880 1376 667 288 254064 396745
w/patch & reclaim 1079 1385 926 252 291625 548873
These numbers are the average of 2 runs of 3 "make -j" runs done right
after system boot. Run-to-run variability for "make -j" is huge, so
these numbers aren't terribly useful except to seee that with reclaim
the benchmark still finishes in a reasonable amount of time.
I also looked at the NUMA hit/miss stats for the "make -j" runs and the
reclaim doesn't make any difference when the machine is thrashing away.
Doing a "make -j8" on a single node that is filled with page cache pages
takes 700 seconds with reclaim turned on and 735 seconds without reclaim
(due to remote memory accesses).
The simple zone_reclaim syscall program is at
http://www.bork.org/~mort/sgi/zone_reclaim.c
Signed-off-by: Martin Hicks <mort@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Robert Love
Jens Axboe
Martin Hicks
Linus Torvalds