A kernel event notification mechanism

The kernel has a range of mechanisms for notifying user space when something of interest happens. These include dnotify and inotify for filesystem events, signals, poll(), tracepoints, uevents, and more. One might think that there would be little need for yet another, but there are still events of interest that user space can only learn about by polling. In an attempt to fix this problem, David Howells, not content with his recent attempt to add seven new system calls for filesystem mounting, has put forward a proposal for a general-purpose event notification mechanism for Linux.

Full Story (comments: 23)