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Robert Love6f979332005-07-15 03:56:33 -07001 inotify
2 a powerful yet simple file change notification system
Robert Love0eeca282005-07-12 17:06:03 -04003
4
5
6Document started 15 Mar 2005 by Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Zhang Zhena5b2f952015-02-10 14:08:30 -08007Document updated 4 Jan 2015 by Zhang Zhen <zhenzhang.zhang@huawei.com>
8 --Deleted obsoleted interface, just refer to manpages for user interface.
Robert Love0eeca282005-07-12 17:06:03 -04009
Zhang Zhena5b2f952015-02-10 14:08:30 -080010(i) Rationale
Robert Love0eeca282005-07-12 17:06:03 -040011
12Q: What is the design decision behind not tying the watch to the open fd of
13 the watched object?
14
15A: Watches are associated with an open inotify device, not an open file.
16 This solves the primary problem with dnotify: keeping the file open pins
17 the file and thus, worse, pins the mount. Dnotify is therefore infeasible
18 for use on a desktop system with removable media as the media cannot be
Robert Love6f979332005-07-15 03:56:33 -070019 unmounted. Watching a file should not require that it be open.
Robert Love0eeca282005-07-12 17:06:03 -040020
Robert Love6f979332005-07-15 03:56:33 -070021Q: What is the design decision behind using an-fd-per-instance as opposed to
Robert Love0eeca282005-07-12 17:06:03 -040022 an fd-per-watch?
23
24A: An fd-per-watch quickly consumes more file descriptors than are allowed,
25 more fd's than are feasible to manage, and more fd's than are optimally
26 select()-able. Yes, root can bump the per-process fd limit and yes, users
27 can use epoll, but requiring both is a silly and extraneous requirement.
28 A watch consumes less memory than an open file, separating the number
29 spaces is thus sensible. The current design is what user-space developers
Robert Love6f979332005-07-15 03:56:33 -070030 want: Users initialize inotify, once, and add n watches, requiring but one
31 fd and no twiddling with fd limits. Initializing an inotify instance two
Robert Love0eeca282005-07-12 17:06:03 -040032 thousand times is silly. If we can implement user-space's preferences
33 cleanly--and we can, the idr layer makes stuff like this trivial--then we
34 should.
35
36 There are other good arguments. With a single fd, there is a single
37 item to block on, which is mapped to a single queue of events. The single
38 fd returns all watch events and also any potential out-of-band data. If
39 every fd was a separate watch,
40
41 - There would be no way to get event ordering. Events on file foo and
42 file bar would pop poll() on both fd's, but there would be no way to tell
43 which happened first. A single queue trivially gives you ordering. Such
44 ordering is crucial to existing applications such as Beagle. Imagine
45 "mv a b ; mv b a" events without ordering.
46
47 - We'd have to maintain n fd's and n internal queues with state,
48 versus just one. It is a lot messier in the kernel. A single, linear
49 queue is the data structure that makes sense.
50
51 - User-space developers prefer the current API. The Beagle guys, for
52 example, love it. Trust me, I asked. It is not a surprise: Who'd want
53 to manage and block on 1000 fd's via select?
54
Robert Love0eeca282005-07-12 17:06:03 -040055 - No way to get out of band data.
56
57 - 1024 is still too low. ;-)
58
59 When you talk about designing a file change notification system that
60 scales to 1000s of directories, juggling 1000s of fd's just does not seem
61 the right interface. It is too heavy.
62
Robert Love6f979332005-07-15 03:56:33 -070063 Additionally, it _is_ possible to more than one instance and
64 juggle more than one queue and thus more than one associated fd. There
65 need not be a one-fd-per-process mapping; it is one-fd-per-queue and a
66 process can easily want more than one queue.
67
Robert Love0eeca282005-07-12 17:06:03 -040068Q: Why the system call approach?
69
70A: The poor user-space interface is the second biggest problem with dnotify.
71 Signals are a terrible, terrible interface for file notification. Or for
72 anything, for that matter. The ideal solution, from all perspectives, is a
73 file descriptor-based one that allows basic file I/O and poll/select.
74 Obtaining the fd and managing the watches could have been done either via a
75 device file or a family of new system calls. We decided to implement a
Amy Griffis0edce1972006-06-01 13:11:07 -070076 family of system calls because that is the preferred approach for new kernel
Robert Love6f979332005-07-15 03:56:33 -070077 interfaces. The only real difference was whether we wanted to use open(2)
78 and ioctl(2) or a couple of new system calls. System calls beat ioctls.
Robert Love0eeca282005-07-12 17:06:03 -040079