From 0eeca28300df110bd6ed54b31193c83b87921443 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Robert Love Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 17:06:03 -0400 Subject: [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 Cc: John McCutchan Cc: Christoph Hellwig Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- fs/Makefile | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) (limited to 'fs/Makefile') diff --git a/fs/Makefile b/fs/Makefile index 20edcf28bfd2..cf95eb894fd5 100644 --- a/fs/Makefile +++ b/fs/Makefile @@ -12,6 +12,7 @@ obj-y := open.o read_write.o file_table.o buffer.o bio.o super.o \ seq_file.o xattr.o libfs.o fs-writeback.o mpage.o direct-io.o \ ioprio.o +obj-$(CONFIG_INOTIFY) += inotify.o obj-$(CONFIG_EPOLL) += eventpoll.o obj-$(CONFIG_COMPAT) += compat.o -- cgit v1.2.3