Adding upstream version 4.19.249.upstream/4.19.249

Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>

1 files changed, 79 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt
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+				   inotify
+	    a powerful yet simple file change notification system
+
+
+
+Document started 15 Mar 2005 by Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
+Document updated 4 Jan 2015 by Zhang Zhen <zhenzhang.zhang@huawei.com>
+	--Deleted obsoleted interface, just refer to manpages for user interface.
+
+(i) Rationale
+
+Q: What is the design decision behind not tying the watch to the open fd of
+   the watched object?
+
+A: Watches are associated with an open inotify device, not an open file.
+   This solves the primary problem with dnotify: keeping the file open pins
+   the file and thus, worse, pins the mount.  Dnotify is therefore infeasible
+   for use on a desktop system with removable media as the media cannot be
+   unmounted.  Watching a file should not require that it be open.
+
+Q: What is the design decision behind using an-fd-per-instance as opposed to
+   an fd-per-watch?
+
+A: An fd-per-watch quickly consumes more file descriptors than are allowed,
+   more fd's than are feasible to manage, and more fd's than are optimally
+   select()-able.  Yes, root can bump the per-process fd limit and yes, users
+   can use epoll, but requiring both is a silly and extraneous requirement.
+   A watch consumes less memory than an open file, separating the number
+   spaces is thus sensible.  The current design is what user-space developers
+   want: Users initialize inotify, once, and add n watches, requiring but one
+   fd and no twiddling with fd limits.  Initializing an inotify instance two
+   thousand times is silly.  If we can implement user-space's preferences 
+   cleanly--and we can, the idr layer makes stuff like this trivial--then we 
+   should.
+
+   There are other good arguments.  With a single fd, there is a single
+   item to block on, which is mapped to a single queue of events.  The single
+   fd returns all watch events and also any potential out-of-band data.  If
+   every fd was a separate watch,
+
+   - There would be no way to get event ordering.  Events on file foo and
+     file bar would pop poll() on both fd's, but there would be no way to tell
+     which happened first.  A single queue trivially gives you ordering.  Such
+     ordering is crucial to existing applications such as Beagle.  Imagine
+     "mv a b ; mv b a" events without ordering.
+
+   - We'd have to maintain n fd's and n internal queues with state,
+     versus just one.  It is a lot messier in the kernel.  A single, linear
+     queue is the data structure that makes sense.
+
+   - User-space developers prefer the current API.  The Beagle guys, for
+     example, love it.  Trust me, I asked.  It is not a surprise: Who'd want
+     to manage and block on 1000 fd's via select?
+
+   - No way to get out of band data.
+
+   - 1024 is still too low.  ;-)
+
+   When you talk about designing a file change notification system that
+   scales to 1000s of directories, juggling 1000s of fd's just does not seem
+   the right interface.  It is too heavy.
+
+   Additionally, it _is_ possible to  more than one instance  and
+   juggle more than one queue and thus more than one associated fd.  There
+   need not be a one-fd-per-process mapping; it is one-fd-per-queue and a
+   process can easily want more than one queue.
+
+Q: Why the system call approach?
+
+A: The poor user-space interface is the second biggest problem with dnotify.
+   Signals are a terrible, terrible interface for file notification.  Or for
+   anything, for that matter.  The ideal solution, from all perspectives, is a
+   file descriptor-based one that allows basic file I/O and poll/select.
+   Obtaining the fd and managing the watches could have been done either via a
+   device file or a family of new system calls.  We decided to implement a
+   family of system calls because that is the preferred approach for new kernel
+   interfaces.  The only real difference was whether we wanted to use open(2)
+   and ioctl(2) or a couple of new system calls.  System calls beat ioctls.
+