From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1161086AbXCGB1V (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 Mar 2007 20:27:21 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1161123AbXCGB1V (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 Mar 2007 20:27:21 -0500 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.24]:42060 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1161086AbXCGB1U (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 Mar 2007 20:27:20 -0500 Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 17:27:13 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds To: Davide Libenzi cc: Avi Kivity , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Andrew Morton , Al Viro Subject: Re: [patch] epoll use a single inode ... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <45ED1A3C.6030707@argo.co.il> 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 Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Davide Libenzi wrote: > > I'm OK with everything that avoid code duplication due to those fake > inodes. The change can be localized inside the existing API, so it doesn't > really affect me externally. Can you try with the first patch version that doesn't do anything special at all, and just uses a single dentry. Yeah, the dentry name will be identical, and so you would see something like "7 -> signalfd:signalfd" when you do "ls -l /proc//fd/" on a task that has such a special file descriptor (with no way to tell different timerfd's and signalfd's apart), but I think it's better to start off simple than to overdesign things. And trying to tell them apart sounds a bit like overdesign, if only because I really don't see why anybody would really *care*. So it's a timer for poll/select/epoll - why care about anything else? If it really really turns out that people care, we know how we can do it. We'd hook into "proc_fd_link()" and we'd allow a per-file mntget/dget that we could use to let special filesystems create fake entries on demand. So it's not impossible, it's just likely simply not needed. Linus