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path: root/include/linux/inotify.h
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2006-03-25[PATCH] inotify: lock avoidance with parent watch status in dentryNick Piggin
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>
2005-12-12[PATCH] inotify: add two inotify_add_watch flagsJohn McCutchan
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>
2005-09-07[PATCH] inotify: fix event loss on hardlinked filesJohn McCutchan
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>
2005-08-15[PATCH] inotify: add MOVE_SELF eventJohn McCutchan
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>
2005-07-12[PATCH] inotifyRobert Love
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>