[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 <[email protected]>
Cc: John McCutchan <[email protected]>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
This commit is contained in:
Robert Love 2005-07-12 17:06:03 -04:00 • committed by Linus Torvalds
commit 0eeca28300
24 changed files with 1639 additions and 67 deletions

View file

@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
#include <linux/file.h>
#include <linux/smp_lock.h>
#include <linux/quotaops.h>
#include <linux/dnotify.h>
#include <linux/fsnotify.h>
#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/slab.h>
#include <linux/tty.h>
@ -951,6 +951,7 @@ asmlinkage long sys_open(const char __user * filename, int flags, int mode)
put_unused_fd(fd);
fd = PTR_ERR(f);
} else {
fsnotify_open(f->f_dentry);
fd_install(fd, f);
}
}