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22 Commits (0d945c1f966b2bcb67bb12be749da0a7fb00201b)

Author SHA1 Message Date
Henry Wilson 4d97f7d53d inotify: Add flag IN_MASK_CREATE for inotify_add_watch()
The flag IN_MASK_CREATE is introduced as a flag for inotiy_add_watch()
which prevents inotify from modifying any existing watches when invoked.
If the pathname specified in the call has a watched inode associated
with it and IN_MASK_CREATE is specified, fail with an errno of EEXIST.

Use of IN_MASK_CREATE with IN_MASK_ADD is reserved for future use and
will return EINVAL.

RATIONALE

In the current implementation, there is no way to prevent
inotify_add_watch() from modifying existing watch descriptors. Even if
the caller keeps a record of all watch descriptors collected, this is
only sufficient to detect that an existing watch descriptor may have
been modified.

The assumption that a particular path will map to the same inode over
multiple calls to inotify_add_watch() cannot be made as files can be
renamed or deleted.  It is also not possible to assume that two distinct
paths do no map to the same inode, due to hard-links or a dereferenced
symbolic link. Further uses of inotify_add_watch() to revert the change
may cause other watch descriptors to be modified or created, merely
compunding the problem. There is currently no system call such as
inotify_modify_watch() to explicity modify a watch descriptor, which
would be able to revert unwanted changes. Thus the caller cannot
guarantee to be able to revert any changes to existing watch decriptors.

Additionally the caller cannot assume that the events that are
associated with a watch descriptor are within the set requested, as any
future calls to inotify_add_watch() may unintentionally modify a watch
descriptor's mask. Thus it cannot currently be guaranteed that a watch
descriptor will only generate events which have been requested. The
program must filter events which come through its watch descriptor to
within its expected range.

Reviewed-by: Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Henry Wilson <henry.wilson@acentic.com>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
2018-06-27 19:21:25 +02:00
Greg Kroah-Hartman b24413180f License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license
Many source files in the tree are missing licensing information, which
makes it harder for compliance tools to determine the correct license.

By default all files without license information are under the default
license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2.

Update the files which contain no license information with the 'GPL-2.0'
SPDX license identifier.  The SPDX identifier is a legally binding
shorthand, which can be used instead of the full boiler plate text.

This patch is based on work done by Thomas Gleixner and Kate Stewart and
Philippe Ombredanne.

How this work was done:

Patches were generated and checked against linux-4.14-rc6 for a subset of
the use cases:
 - file had no licensing information it it.
 - file was a */uapi/* one with no licensing information in it,
 - file was a */uapi/* one with existing licensing information,

Further patches will be generated in subsequent months to fix up cases
where non-standard license headers were used, and references to license
had to be inferred by heuristics based on keywords.

The analysis to determine which SPDX License Identifier to be applied to
a file was done in a spreadsheet of side by side results from of the
output of two independent scanners (ScanCode & Windriver) producing SPDX
tag:value files created by Philippe Ombredanne.  Philippe prepared the
base worksheet, and did an initial spot review of a few 1000 files.

The 4.13 kernel was the starting point of the analysis with 60,537 files
assessed.  Kate Stewart did a file by file comparison of the scanner
results in the spreadsheet to determine which SPDX license identifier(s)
to be applied to the file. She confirmed any determination that was not
immediately clear with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

Criteria used to select files for SPDX license identifier tagging was:
 - Files considered eligible had to be source code files.
 - Make and config files were included as candidates if they contained >5
   lines of source
 - File already had some variant of a license header in it (even if <5
   lines).

All documentation files were explicitly excluded.

The following heuristics were used to determine which SPDX license
identifiers to apply.

 - when both scanners couldn't find any license traces, file was
   considered to have no license information in it, and the top level
   COPYING file license applied.

   For non */uapi/* files that summary was:

   SPDX license identifier                            # files
   ---------------------------------------------------|-------
   GPL-2.0                                              11139

   and resulted in the first patch in this series.

   If that file was a */uapi/* path one, it was "GPL-2.0 WITH
   Linux-syscall-note" otherwise it was "GPL-2.0".  Results of that was:

   SPDX license identifier                            # files
   ---------------------------------------------------|-------
   GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note                        930

   and resulted in the second patch in this series.

 - if a file had some form of licensing information in it, and was one
   of the */uapi/* ones, it was denoted with the Linux-syscall-note if
   any GPL family license was found in the file or had no licensing in
   it (per prior point).  Results summary:

   SPDX license identifier                            # files
   ---------------------------------------------------|------
   GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note                       270
   GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                      169
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-2-Clause)    21
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause)    17
   LGPL-2.1+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                      15
   GPL-1.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                       14
   ((GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause)    5
   LGPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                       4
   LGPL-2.1 WITH Linux-syscall-note                        3
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT)              3
   ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND MIT)             1

   and that resulted in the third patch in this series.

 - when the two scanners agreed on the detected license(s), that became
   the concluded license(s).

 - when there was disagreement between the two scanners (one detected a
   license but the other didn't, or they both detected different
   licenses) a manual inspection of the file occurred.

 - In most cases a manual inspection of the information in the file
   resulted in a clear resolution of the license that should apply (and
   which scanner probably needed to revisit its heuristics).

 - When it was not immediately clear, the license identifier was
   confirmed with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

 - If there was any question as to the appropriate license identifier,
   the file was flagged for further research and to be revisited later
   in time.

In total, over 70 hours of logged manual review was done on the
spreadsheet to determine the SPDX license identifiers to apply to the
source files by Kate, Philippe, Thomas and, in some cases, confirmation
by lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

Kate also obtained a third independent scan of the 4.13 code base from
FOSSology, and compared selected files where the other two scanners
disagreed against that SPDX file, to see if there was new insights.  The
Windriver scanner is based on an older version of FOSSology in part, so
they are related.

Thomas did random spot checks in about 500 files from the spreadsheets
for the uapi headers and agreed with SPDX license identifier in the
files he inspected. For the non-uapi files Thomas did random spot checks
in about 15000 files.

In initial set of patches against 4.14-rc6, 3 files were found to have
copy/paste license identifier errors, and have been fixed to reflect the
correct identifier.

Additionally Philippe spent 10 hours this week doing a detailed manual
inspection and review of the 12,461 patched files from the initial patch
version early this week with:
 - a full scancode scan run, collecting the matched texts, detected
   license ids and scores
 - reviewing anything where there was a license detected (about 500+
   files) to ensure that the applied SPDX license was correct
 - reviewing anything where there was no detection but the patch license
   was not GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note to ensure that the applied
   SPDX license was correct

This produced a worksheet with 20 files needing minor correction.  This
worksheet was then exported into 3 different .csv files for the
different types of files to be modified.

These .csv files were then reviewed by Greg.  Thomas wrote a script to
parse the csv files and add the proper SPDX tag to the file, in the
format that the file expected.  This script was further refined by Greg
based on the output to detect more types of files automatically and to
distinguish between header and source .c files (which need different
comment types.)  Finally Greg ran the script using the .csv files to
generate the patches.

Reviewed-by: Kate Stewart <kstewart@linuxfoundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Philippe Ombredanne <pombredanne@nexb.com>
Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2017-11-02 11:10:55 +01:00
David Howells 607ca46e97 UAPI: (Scripted) Disintegrate include/linux
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Acked-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
2012-10-13 10:46:48 +01:00
Eric Paris f874e1ac21 inotify: force inotify and fsnotify use same bits
inotify uses bits called IN_* and fsnotify uses bits called FS_*.  These
need to line up.  This patch adds build time checks to make sure noone can
change these bits so they are not the same.

Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
2010-07-28 10:18:49 -04:00
Eric Paris 8c1934c8d7 inotify: allow users to request not to recieve events on unlinked children
An inotify watch on a directory will send events for children even if those
children have been unlinked.  This patch add a new inotify flag IN_EXCL_UNLINK
which allows a watch to specificy they don't care about unlinked children.
This should fix performance problems seen by tasks which add a watch to
/tmp and then are overrun with events when other processes are reading and
writing to unlinked files they created in /tmp.

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16296

Requested-by: Matthias Clasen <mclasen@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
2010-07-28 10:18:49 -04:00
Dave Young d14f172948 sysctl extern cleanup: inotify
Extern declarations in sysctl.c should be move to their own head file, and
then include them in relavant .c files.

Move inotify_table extern declaration to linux/inotify.h

Signed-off-by: Dave Young <hidave.darkstar@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
2010-07-28 09:59:01 -04:00
Eric Paris 2dfc1cae4c inotify: remove inotify in kernel interface
nothing uses inotify in the kernel, drop it!

Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
2010-07-28 09:58:31 -04:00
Al Viro 8f7b0ba1c8 Fix inotify watch removal/umount races
Inotify watch removals suck violently.

To kick the watch out we need (in this order) inode->inotify_mutex and
ih->mutex.  That's fine if we have a hold on inode; however, for all
other cases we need to make damn sure we don't race with umount.  We can
*NOT* just grab a reference to a watch - inotify_unmount_inodes() will
happily sail past it and we'll end with reference to inode potentially
outliving its superblock.

Ideally we just want to grab an active reference to superblock if we
can; that will make sure we won't go into inotify_umount_inodes() until
we are done.  Cleanup is just deactivate_super().

However, that leaves a messy case - what if we *are* racing with
umount() and active references to superblock can't be acquired anymore?
We can bump ->s_count, grab ->s_umount, which will almost certainly wait
until the superblock is shut down and the watch in question is pining
for fjords.  That's fine, but there is a problem - we might have hit the
window between ->s_active getting to 0 / ->s_count - below S_BIAS (i.e.
the moment when superblock is past the point of no return and is heading
for shutdown) and the moment when deactivate_super() acquires
->s_umount.

We could just do drop_super() yield() and retry, but that's rather
antisocial and this stuff is luser-triggerable.  OTOH, having grabbed
->s_umount and having found that we'd got there first (i.e.  that
->s_root is non-NULL) we know that we won't race with
inotify_umount_inodes().

So we could grab a reference to watch and do the rest as above, just
with drop_super() instead of deactivate_super(), right? Wrong.  We had
to drop ih->mutex before we could grab ->s_umount.  So the watch
could've been gone already.

That still can be dealt with - we need to save watch->wd, do idr_find()
and compare its result with our pointer.  If they match, we either have
the damn thing still alive or we'd lost not one but two races at once,
the watch had been killed and a new one got created with the same ->wd
at the same address.  That couldn't have happened in inotify_destroy(),
but inotify_rm_wd() could run into that.  Still, "new one got created"
is not a problem - we have every right to kill it or leave it alone,
whatever's more convenient.

So we can use idr_find(...) == watch && watch->inode->i_sb == sb as
"grab it and kill it" check.  If it's been our original watch, we are
fine, if it's a newcomer - nevermind, just pretend that we'd won the
race and kill the fscker anyway; we are safe since we know that its
superblock won't be going away.

And yes, this is far beyond mere "not very pretty"; so's the entire
concept of inotify to start with.

Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Acked-by: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-11-15 12:26:44 -08:00
Ulrich Drepper 510df2dd48 flag parameters: NONBLOCK in inotify_init
This patch adds non-blocking support for inotify_init1.  The
additional changes needed are minimal.

The following test must be adjusted for architectures other than x86 and
x86-64 and in case the syscall numbers changed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/syscall.h>

#ifndef __NR_inotify_init1
# ifdef __x86_64__
#  define __NR_inotify_init1 294
# elif defined __i386__
#  define __NR_inotify_init1 332
# else
#  error "need __NR_inotify_init1"
# endif
#endif

#define IN_NONBLOCK O_NONBLOCK

int
main (void)
{
  int fd = syscall (__NR_inotify_init1, 0);
  if (fd == -1)
    {
      puts ("inotify_init1(0) failed");
      return 1;
    }
  int fl = fcntl (fd, F_GETFL);
  if (fl == -1)
    {
      puts ("fcntl failed");
      return 1;
    }
  if (fl & O_NONBLOCK)
    {
      puts ("inotify_init1(0) set non-blocking mode");
      return 1;
    }
  close (fd);

  fd = syscall (__NR_inotify_init1, IN_NONBLOCK);
  if (fd == -1)
    {
      puts ("inotify_init1(IN_NONBLOCK) failed");
      return 1;
    }
  fl = fcntl (fd, F_GETFL);
  if (fl == -1)
    {
      puts ("fcntl failed");
      return 1;
    }
  if ((fl & O_NONBLOCK) == 0)
    {
      puts ("inotify_init1(IN_NONBLOCK) set non-blocking mode");
      return 1;
    }
  close (fd);

  puts ("OK");

  return 0;
}
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Signed-off-by: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@googlemail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-07-24 10:47:29 -07:00
Ulrich Drepper 4006553b06 flag parameters: inotify_init
This patch introduces the new syscall inotify_init1 (note: the 1 stands for
the one parameter the syscall takes, as opposed to no parameter before).  The
values accepted for this parameter are function-specific and defined in the
inotify.h header.  Here the values must match the O_* flags, though.  In this
patch CLOEXEC support is introduced.

The following test must be adjusted for architectures other than x86 and
x86-64 and in case the syscall numbers changed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/syscall.h>

#ifndef __NR_inotify_init1
# ifdef __x86_64__
#  define __NR_inotify_init1 294
# elif defined __i386__
#  define __NR_inotify_init1 332
# else
#  error "need __NR_inotify_init1"
# endif
#endif

#define IN_CLOEXEC O_CLOEXEC

int
main (void)
{
  int fd;
  fd = syscall (__NR_inotify_init1, 0);
  if (fd == -1)
    {
      puts ("inotify_init1(0) failed");
      return 1;
    }
  int coe = fcntl (fd, F_GETFD);
  if (coe == -1)
    {
      puts ("fcntl failed");
      return 1;
    }
  if (coe & FD_CLOEXEC)
    {
      puts ("inotify_init1(0) set close-on-exit");
      return 1;
    }
  close (fd);

  fd = syscall (__NR_inotify_init1, IN_CLOEXEC);
  if (fd == -1)
    {
      puts ("inotify_init1(IN_CLOEXEC) failed");
      return 1;
    }
  coe = fcntl (fd, F_GETFD);
  if (coe == -1)
    {
      puts ("fcntl failed");
      return 1;
    }
  if ((coe & FD_CLOEXEC) == 0)
    {
      puts ("inotify_init1(O_CLOEXEC) does not set close-on-exit");
      return 1;
    }
  close (fd);

  puts ("OK");

  return 0;
}
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: add sys_ni stub]
Signed-off-by: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@googlemail.com>
Cc: <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-07-24 10:47:28 -07:00
Al Viro 455434d450 [PATCH] new helper - inotify_evict_watch()
Kicks the watch out without dropping it.  Called under ->inotify_mutex

Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2007-10-21 02:37:38 -04:00
Al Viro b9efe8a234 [PATCH] new helper - inotify_clone_watch()
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2007-10-21 02:37:32 -04:00
Amy Griffis 3ca10067f7 [PATCH] inotify (4/5): allow watch removal from event handler
Allow callers to remove watches from their event handler via
inotify_remove_watch_locked().  This functionality can be used to
achieve IN_ONESHOT-like functionality for a subset of events in the
mask.

Signed-off-by: Amy Griffis <amy.griffis@hp.com>
Acked-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Acked-by: John McCutchan <john@johnmccutchan.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2006-06-20 05:25:19 -04:00
Amy Griffis a9dc971d3f [PATCH] inotify (3/5): add interfaces to kernel API
Add inotify_init_watch() so caller can use inotify_watch refcounts
before calling inotify_add_watch().

Add inotify_find_watch() to find an existing watch for an (ih,inode)
pair.  This is similar to inotify_find_update_watch(), but does not
update the watch's mask if one is found.

Add inotify_rm_watch() to remove a watch via the watch pointer instead
of the watch descriptor.

Signed-off-by: Amy Griffis <amy.griffis@hp.com>
Acked-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Acked-by: John McCutchan <john@johnmccutchan.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2006-06-20 05:25:18 -04:00
Amy Griffis 7c29772288 [PATCH] inotify (2/5): add name's inode to event handler
When an inotify event includes a dentry name, also include the inode
associated with that name.

Signed-off-by: Amy Griffis <amy.griffis@hp.com>
Acked-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Acked-by: John McCutchan <john@johnmccutchan.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2006-06-20 05:25:18 -04:00
Amy Griffis 2d9048e201 [PATCH] inotify (1/5): split kernel API from userspace support
The following series of patches introduces a kernel API for inotify,
making it possible for kernel modules to benefit from inotify's
mechanism for watching inodes.  With these patches, inotify will
maintain for each caller a list of watches (via an embedded struct
inotify_watch), where each inotify_watch is associated with a
corresponding struct inode.  The caller registers an event handler and
specifies for which filesystem events their event handler should be
called per inotify_watch.

Signed-off-by: Amy Griffis <amy.griffis@hp.com>
Acked-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Acked-by: John McCutchan <john@johnmccutchan.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2006-06-20 05:25:17 -04:00
Al Viro 90204e0b7b [PATCH] remove config.h from inotify.h
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2006-06-20 05:25:17 -04:00
Nick Piggin c32ccd87bf [PATCH] inotify: lock avoidance with parent watch status in dentry
Previous inotify work avoidance is good when inotify is completely unused,
but it breaks down if even a single watch is in place anywhere in the
system.  Robin Holt notices that udev is one such culprit - it slows down a
512-thread application on a 512 CPU system from 6 seconds to 22 minutes.

Solve this by adding a flag in the dentry that tells inotify whether or not
its parent inode has a watch on it.  Event queueing to parent will skip
taking locks if this flag is cleared.  Setting and clearing of this flag on
all child dentries versus event delivery: this is no in terms of race
cases, and that was shown to be equivalent to always performing the check.

The essential behaviour is that activity occuring _after_ a watch has been
added and _before_ it has been removed, will generate events.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Cc: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-03-25 08:22:53 -08:00
John McCutchan 8140a5005b [PATCH] inotify: add two inotify_add_watch flags
The below patch lets userspace have more control over the inodes that
inotify will watch.  It introduces two new flags.

        IN_ONLYDIR -- only watch the inode if it is a directory.
        This is needed to avoid the race that can occur when we want to be
        sure that we are watching a directory.

        IN_DONT_FOLLOW -- don't follow a symlink.  In combination
        with IN_ONLYDIR we can make sure that we don't watch the target of
        symlinks.

The issues the flags fix came up when writing the gnome-vfs inotify
backend.  Default behaviour is unchanged.

Signed-off-by: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Acked-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2005-12-12 08:57:43 -08:00
John McCutchan 7ea6040b0e [PATCH] inotify: fix event loss on hardlinked files
People have run into a problem when they do this:

watch (file1, all_events);
watch (file2, some_events);

if file2 is a hard link to file1, some events will be missed because by
default we replace the mask.  The patch below adds a flag IN_MASK_ADD which
will cause inotify to add to the existing mask if present.

Signed-off-by: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Signed-off-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2005-09-07 16:57:39 -07:00
John McCutchan 89204c40a0 [PATCH] inotify: add MOVE_SELF event
This adds a MOVE_SELF event to inotify.  It is sent whenever the inode
you are watching is moved.  We need this event so that we can catch
something like this:

 - app1:
	watch /etc/mtab

 - app2:
	cp /etc/mtab /tmp/mtab-work
	mv /etc/mtab /etc/mtab~
	mv /tmp/mtab-work /etc/mtab

app1 still thinks it's watching /etc/mtab but it's actually watching
/etc/mtab~.

Signed-off-by: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Signed-off-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2005-08-15 09:50:31 -07:00
Robert Love 0eeca28300 [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 <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>
2005-07-12 20:38:38 -07:00