Re: A desktop environment[1] kernel wishlist

[Heinrich Schuchardt <xypron.glpk@gmx.de>]

On 31.10.2014 10:36, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Mon 27-10-14 20:02:51, Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff wrote:
>>> If "recursive mtime" was available, would that work for you?
>>
>> It would work for detecting "offline" changes. I suppose recursive
>> mtime not viable for online monitoring, mostly because detecting file
>> renaming would be a massive PITA (and we already have fanotify with
>> exactly this problem).
>    Yes, you'll get only "something has changed in a subtree" information for
> each directory. You'd then have to rescan the directory to find out what
> has changed. But there's no simple solution for this - either you have to
> process tons of events for busy directory tree or you have to somehow
> reduce the amount of information provided to userspace...

If inotify_add_watch() would allow to mark a complete mount (like 
fanotify_mark() called with FAN_MOUNT) events for all files on this 
mount could be detected. If furthermore inotify_read() would return the 
complete relative path of the changed file relative to the mount in 
inotify_event->name, it would be obvious what the meaning of the event is.

Best regards

Heinrich Schuchardt