The 2.6.37 kernel is out

Posted Jan 5, 2011 14:19 UTC (Wed) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103)
In reply to: The 2.6.37 kernel is out by foom
Parent article: The 2.6.37 kernel is out

fanotify is useful for at least three use cases where inotify wasn't useful at all: for indexers/crawlers, for readahead implementations, and for antivirus solutions. All these three need recursive looks and in the last case synchronous events. fanotify delivers that, inotify doesn't.

Right now, inotify is a lot more useful when watching particular directories (i.e. a nautilus window which shall be a live view on some directory), for most other things fanotify is the better choice.

The 2.6.37 kernel is out

Posted Jan 5, 2011 15:36 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't see how you can possibly use it for an indexer. Of course, recursive watches are a great idea -- and if they were added on top of the functionality inotify provided, that'd be wonderful. Users have been asking for that for a long time.

But, for an index generated by the indexer to be useful, it needs to be able to tell the user where the file with the searched-for-content is located -- so it needs to be notified about renames too, which fanotify doesn't provide. Am I wrong?

Boot-time readahead and antivirus is such a narrow solution-space that I don't see how this whole new infrastructure and API is justified if it can only really be used for those two things.

The 2.6.37 kernel is out

Posted Jan 5, 2011 18:18 UTC (Wed) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] (1 responses)

Can renames be detected via directory changes, similar in some sense to git rename "detection"?

The 2.6.37 kernel is out

Posted Jan 6, 2011 3:03 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

I do not have a 2.6.37 kernel installed to test, but my understanding is that renames cause no events to be emitted at all.