Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755790AbZIJO1Y (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:27:24 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1755745AbZIJO1Y (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:27:24 -0400 Received: from mail-vw0-f195.google.com ([209.85.212.195]:65160 "EHLO mail-vw0-f195.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755731AbZIJO1X convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:27:23 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <87fxaxvuh6.fsf@master.homenet> References: <87fxaxvuh6.fsf@master.homenet> Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:27:25 -0400 Message-ID: <7e0fb38c0909100727t51d3d523o403e05a225881403@mail.gmail.com> Subject: Re: extend inotify to support file descriptors in addition to paths From: Eric Paris To: Giuseppe Scrivano Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, bug-coreutils@gnu.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1370 Lines: 26 On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 8:21 PM, Giuseppe Scrivano wrote: > at the moment inotify permits to add new files to be watched using their > path. ?There are situations where the file path is not know but a > descriptor is available. ?It would be desiderable to have the > possibility to use the inotify system even in these (rare) cases. I don't think specifying the inode in question by fd is fundamentally a bad idea. It is the reason I decided to use fd's when registering event's in the upcoming fanotify rather than pathnames. I do however question if we really want to add yet another syscall for inotify. We've already seen that inotify is very hard to expand. The fixed message length, lack of information a number of users want, and difficultly in extending those things make me reticent to support more extentions. Personally I'd rather see us/you move to fanotify which is (I hope) extensible forever. If only I could get networking people to review it. Have you looked at fanotify? I'm going to repost the series in a couple minutes, maybe you could tell me if fanotify might work for you? -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/