Re: which ioctls matter across filesystems

Robert Love
2005-04-29T20:11:02Z

On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 15:53 -0400, Trond Myklebust wrote:

> We are discussing the equivalent of dnotify as a potential candidate for
> the first minor version of NFSv4, but not inotify.
> The purpose of our dnotify implementation is address the needs of things
> like file browsers that don't really care about synchronous notification
> of changes, but that do currently cause a lot of unnecessary traffic on
> the wire due to constantly polling stat() and doing readdir() updates.
> The jury is still out as to whether or not the callbacks actually do
> reduce on-the-wire traffic, though, so we may drop it.

What about inotify makes it insufficient for your needs?

> What kind of real-world applications exist out there that need inotify
> functionality, and what sort of requirements do they have (in particular
> w.r.t. the notification mechanism)?

A few worksets:

- Current users, such as FAM and Samba, that need simple file
change notification
- Random applications that want to watch a file or two
- The Linux desktop
- Real-time live-updating indexing systems, such as Beagle,
that compete with f.e. Apple's Spotlight.

Best,

Robert Love