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Re: extend inotify to support file descriptors in addition to paths
From: |
Giuseppe Scrivano |
Subject: |
Re: extend inotify to support file descriptors in addition to paths |
Date: |
Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:39:38 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.1.50 (gnu/linux) |
Eric Paris <address@hidden> writes:
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 8:21 PM, Giuseppe Scrivano <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> at the moment inotify permits to add new files to be watched using their
>> path. There are situations where the file path is not know but a
>> descriptor is available. It would be desiderable to have the
>> possibility to use the inotify system even in these (rare) cases.
>
> I don't think specifying the inode in question by fd is fundamentally
> a bad idea. It is the reason I decided to use fd's when registering
> event's in the upcoming fanotify rather than pathnames. I do however
> question if we really want to add yet another syscall for inotify.
> We've already seen that inotify is very hard to expand. The fixed
> message length, lack of information a number of users want, and
> difficultly in extending those things make me reticent to support more
> extentions.
> Personally I'd rather see us/you move to fanotify which is (I hope)
> extensible forever. If only I could get networking people to review
> it. Have you looked at fanotify? I'm going to repost the series in a
> couple minutes, maybe you could tell me if fanotify might work for
> you?
Sure, I'll take a look at it. I have few questions before look at
details: is it an attempt to replace inotify? Does fanotify use only
fd? Have the possibility to watch a file by its path, like inotify
does, is not a bad idea when the file is not already opened.
Thanks,
Giuseppe