From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S267256AbUBSV1T (ORCPT ); Thu, 19 Feb 2004 16:27:19 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S267240AbUBSV0p (ORCPT ); Thu, 19 Feb 2004 16:26:45 -0500 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:21472 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S267317AbUBSVZQ (ORCPT ); Thu, 19 Feb 2004 16:25:16 -0500 Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 13:30:03 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds To: Jamie Lokier cc: viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk, Tridge , "H. Peter Anvin" , Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: Eureka! (was Re: UTF-8 and case-insensitivity) In-Reply-To: <20040219204853.GA4619@mail.shareable.org> Message-ID: References: <20040219081027.GB4113@mail.shareable.org> <20040219163838.GC2308@mail.shareable.org> <20040219182948.GA3414@mail.shareable.org> <20040219200554.GE31035@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> <20040219204853.GA4619@mail.shareable.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Jamie Lokier wrote: > > Yes: The slow part of my brain thinks dnotify with a new flag > DN_IGNORE_SELF, meaning don't notify for things done by the process > which is watching, would provide equivalent functionality. Basically, yes. However, I can tell you that directory name caching is damn hard, and the kernel does it better than anybody else. The hardest part of caching is not filling the cache - it's knowing when to release it. In other words, forget the filling part, and think about the replacement policy (balacing between the page cache, the directory cache, and regular pages). The kernel already has that. Besides, I really think that we can do this with basically just a few lines of code in the kernel (apart from the actual case comparison, which I'm not even going to worry about - that's totally independent of the cache handling itself, and I don't care about how to write a "windows_equivalent_strncasecmp()". Linus