inotify like service for an entire mount point?

[Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@gmail.com>]

John, Robert, others,

I'm working with the ohsm team on a new kernel module and we need a
way as an example to be notified of every file creation event on a
filesystem so we can determine which storage tier a new file should be
allocating data blocks from.

I believe inotify needs a watch item for every directory it is
watching, so in theory we could walk the directory structure somehow
and register every directory with inotify.  That seems like an
excessive amount of overhead for what seems like a simple to implement
need.

So a couple questions:

Can inotify currently be told to monitor an entire mount point?

Would a patch to enable inotify to do so be entertained?  If so, what
about one that added the ability to just the kernel API.  (We have no
need of it in userspace at present.)

Is there an alternate pre-existing linux kernel solution?

Thanks
Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer
Head of EDD Tape Extraction and Processing team
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