inotify [LWN.net]

inotify

Posted Jul 21, 2006 13:53 UTC (Fri) by arjan (subscriber, #36785)
In reply to: inotify by pizza
Parent article: OLS: On how user space sucks

gnome has a thing called "gamin" which abstracts the various inotify-like interfaces the different operating systems provide. At least IRIX provides a dnotify like thing, as does linux historically. And if the OS is unknown or has no method *gamin* goes to do the polling.

So there is quite reasonable infrastructure for this in gnome.. just it's not being used consistently

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inotify

Posted Jul 22, 2006 9:51 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I am sure that it's worth complaining about... but it's a lot better then the 'famd' it replaced!

For instance with famd if I had mount point or something like that in my home directory then it would crap out if I tried to go more then 2 directories deep. And basicly cause anything to do with gnome that concernes files (nautilus mostly)

With gamin there is no problem.

I think that a huge part of the problem we have with performance on Linux desktop nowadays is that everybody was scrambling to get just the basics in place and everything more or less working.

Hal/Dbus/X.org/inotify(and it's userspace helpers)/desktop search stuff/udev.. etc etc. All of it is thrown together and made to 'make it just work'.

Now it seems that the push is going towards making 'make it work well'. Filling out the blanks, improving performance. That sort of thing.

inotify

Posted Jul 27, 2006 9:35 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

... except of course that if you're a poor sod whose home directory is mounted over the network (perhaps from a centralized RAIDed fileserver), then, oops, the damn thing falls back to polling (over a network!)

Apparently its inability to send notifications to other copies of itself over the network is a *feature*, but given that you're using NFS or a similar fs in any case, I can't imagine what extra security threats could be opened by sending notifications around. (FAM could do this.)