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 --- fs/Kconfig | 13 +++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+) (limited to 'fs/Kconfig') diff --git a/fs/Kconfig b/fs/Kconfig index f93fd41b025d..5d0c4be43dba 100644 --- a/fs/Kconfig +++ b/fs/Kconfig @@ -359,6 +359,19 @@ config ROMFS_FS If you don't know whether you need it, then you don't need it: answer N. +config INOTIFY + bool "Inotify file change notification support" + default y + ---help--- + Say Y here to enable inotify support and the /dev/inotify character + device. Inotify is a file change notification system and a + replacement for dnotify. Inotify fixes numerous shortcomings in + dnotify and introduces several new features. It allows monitoring + of both files and directories via a single open fd. Multiple file + events are supported. + + If unsure, say Y. + config QUOTA bool "Quota support" help -- cgit v1.2.3