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>
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| acpi | ||
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| asm-arm | ||
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| asm-frv | ||
| asm-generic | ||
| asm-h8300 | ||
| asm-i386 | ||
| asm-ia64 | ||
| asm-m32r | ||
| asm-m68k | ||
| asm-m68knommu | ||
| asm-mips | ||
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| asm-ppc | ||
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| asm-sh | ||
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| asm-sparc | ||
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| asm-um | ||
| asm-v850 | ||
| asm-x86_64 | ||
| asm-xtensa | ||
| linux | ||
| math-emu | ||
| media | ||
| mtd | ||
| net | ||
| pcmcia | ||
| rxrpc | ||
| scsi | ||
| sound | ||
| video | ||