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 --- include/linux/sysctl.h | 11 ++++++++++- 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'include/linux/sysctl.h') diff --git a/include/linux/sysctl.h b/include/linux/sysctl.h index 5b5f434ac9a0..ce19a2aa0b21 100644 --- a/include/linux/sysctl.h +++ b/include/linux/sysctl.h @@ -61,7 +61,8 @@ enum CTL_DEV=7, /* Devices */ CTL_BUS=8, /* Busses */ CTL_ABI=9, /* Binary emulation */ - CTL_CPU=10 /* CPU stuff (speed scaling, etc) */ + CTL_CPU=10, /* CPU stuff (speed scaling, etc) */ + CTL_INOTIFY=11 /* Inotify */ }; /* CTL_BUS names: */ @@ -70,6 +71,14 @@ enum CTL_BUS_ISA=1 /* ISA */ }; +/* CTL_INOTIFY names: */ +enum +{ + INOTIFY_MAX_USER_DEVICES=1, /* max number of inotify device instances per user */ + INOTIFY_MAX_USER_WATCHES=2, /* max number of inotify watches per user */ + INOTIFY_MAX_QUEUED_EVENTS=3 /* Max number of queued events per inotify device instance */ +}; + /* CTL_KERN names: */ enum { -- cgit v1.2.2