0eeca28300
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>
|
||
|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| irq | ||
| power | ||
| Kconfig.hz | ||
| Kconfig.preempt | ||
| Makefile | ||
| acct.c | ||
| audit.c | ||
| auditsc.c | ||
| capability.c | ||
| compat.c | ||
| configs.c | ||
| cpu.c | ||
| cpuset.c | ||
| crash_dump.c | ||
| dma.c | ||
| exec_domain.c | ||
| exit.c | ||
| extable.c | ||
| fork.c | ||
| futex.c | ||
| intermodule.c | ||
| itimer.c | ||
| kallsyms.c | ||
| kexec.c | ||
| kfifo.c | ||
| kmod.c | ||
| kprobes.c | ||
| ksysfs.c | ||
| kthread.c | ||
| module.c | ||
| panic.c | ||
| params.c | ||
| pid.c | ||
| posix-cpu-timers.c | ||
| posix-timers.c | ||
| printk.c | ||
| profile.c | ||
| ptrace.c | ||
| rcupdate.c | ||
| resource.c | ||
| sched.c | ||
| seccomp.c | ||
| signal.c | ||
| softirq.c | ||
| spinlock.c | ||
| stop_machine.c | ||
| sys.c | ||
| sys_ni.c | ||
| sysctl.c | ||
| time.c | ||
| timer.c | ||
| uid16.c | ||
| user.c | ||
| wait.c | ||
| workqueue.c | ||