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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
Nick Piggin