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/user.c | 4 ++++ 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+) (limited to 'kernel/user.c') diff --git a/kernel/user.c b/kernel/user.c index 734575d55769..89e562feb1b1 100644 --- a/kernel/user.c +++ b/kernel/user.c @@ -120,6 +120,10 @@ struct user_struct * alloc_uid(uid_t uid) atomic_set(&new->processes, 0); atomic_set(&new->files, 0); atomic_set(&new->sigpending, 0); +#ifdef CONFIG_INOTIFY + atomic_set(&new->inotify_watches, 0); + atomic_set(&new->inotify_devs, 0); +#endif new->mq_bytes = 0; new->locked_shm = 0; -- cgit v1.2.3-59-g8ed1b