[RFC] VFS: mnotify (was: [PATCH 00/23] per device dirty throttling -v8)

[Al Boldi <a1426z@gawab.com>]

Jakob Oestergaard wrote:
> Why on earth would you cripple the kernel defaults for ext3 (which is a
> fine FS for boot/root filesystems), when the *fundamental* problem you
> really want to solve lie much deeper in the implementation of the
> filesystem?  Noatime doesn't solve the problem, it just makes it "less
> horrible".

inotify could easily solve the atime problem, but it's got the drawback of 
forcing the user to register each and every file/dir of interest, which 
isn't really reasonable on TB-filesystems.

It could be feasible to introduce mnotify, which would notify the user of 
meta changes, like atime, across the filesystem.  Something like mnotify 
could also be helpful in CoW situations, provided it supported an in-sync 
interface.


Thanks!

--
Al