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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>
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| .. | ||
| auth.c | ||
| export.c | ||
| lockd.c | ||
| Makefile | ||
| nfs2acl.c | ||
| nfs3acl.c | ||
| nfs3proc.c | ||
| nfs3xdr.c | ||
| nfs4acl.c | ||
| nfs4callback.c | ||
| nfs4idmap.c | ||
| nfs4proc.c | ||
| nfs4recover.c | ||
| nfs4state.c | ||
| nfs4xdr.c | ||
| nfscache.c | ||
| nfsctl.c | ||
| nfsfh.c | ||
| nfsproc.c | ||
| nfssvc.c | ||
| nfsxdr.c | ||
| stats.c | ||
| vfs.c | ||