inotify & NFS error

inotify & NFS error

[Ron Chen]

I know that it is not possible (read: not technically feasible) for the inotify interface to support for NFS or other shared filesystems.

However, I think it is at least useful to tell the application developer that the file is on NFS and thus return of some sort (via errno), and thus when inotify_add_watch(2) is passed with a pathname on NFS, some sort of error will return.

I am one of the maintainers of Open Grid Scheduler (the official open-source Sun Grid Engine). I think having a reliable way of determining whether inotify gets events would greatly benefit applications that are commonly run in clustered environments (like Open Grid Scheduler, Grid Engine, and other HPC job schedulers). Most applications can switch back to polling when inotify is absent, but if the applications themselves do not know, then they can in the worst case sit there waiting forever.

 -Ron