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 --- kernel/sys_ni.c | 3 +++ 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+) (limited to 'kernel/sys_ni.c') diff --git a/kernel/sys_ni.c b/kernel/sys_ni.c index 29196ce..42b40ae 100644 --- a/kernel/sys_ni.c +++ b/kernel/sys_ni.c @@ -80,6 +80,9 @@ cond_syscall(sys_keyctl); cond_syscall(compat_sys_keyctl); cond_syscall(compat_sys_socketcall); cond_syscall(sys_set_zone_reclaim); +cond_syscall(sys_inotify_init); +cond_syscall(sys_inotify_add_watch); +cond_syscall(sys_inotify_rm_watch); /* arch-specific weak syscall entries */ cond_syscall(sys_pciconfig_read); -- cgit v1.1