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docs: filesystems: convert inotify.txt to ReST

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- Add a SPDX header;
- Add a document title;
- Adjust document title;
- Fix list markups;
- Some whitespace fixes and new line breaks;
- Add it to filesystems/index.rst.

Signed-off-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/8f846843ecf1914988feb4d001e3a53d27dc1a65.1581955849.git.mchehab+huawei@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
This commit is contained in:
Mauro Carvalho Chehab 2020-02-17 17:12:10 +01:00 committed by Jonathan Corbet
parent a1ef4bcd16
commit de389cf08d
2 changed files with 23 additions and 11 deletions
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1
Documentation/filesystems/index.rst
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@ -70,6 +70,7 @@ Documentation for filesystem implementations.
hfs
hfsplus
hpfs
inotify
fuse
overlayfs
virtiofs

29
Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt → Documentation/filesystems/inotify.rst
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@ -1,27 +1,36 @@
inotify
a powerful yet simple file change notification system
.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
===============================================================
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.
- 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
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.
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
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,
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.
@ -65,9 +74,11 @@ A: An fd-per-watch quickly consumes more file descriptors than are allowed,
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?
Q:
Why the system call approach?
A: The poor user-space interface is the second biggest problem with dnotify.
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.