[PATCH] inotify

inotify is intended to correct the deficiencies of dnotify, particularly
its inability to scale and its terrible user interface:

        * dnotify requires the opening of one fd per each directory
          that you intend to watch. This quickly results in too many
          open files and pins removable media, preventing unmount.
        * dnotify is directory-based. You only learn about changes to
          directories. Sure, a change to a file in a directory affects
          the directory, but you are then forced to keep a cache of
          stat structures.
        * dnotify's interface to user-space is awful.  Signals?

inotify provides a more usable, simple, powerful solution to file change
notification:

        * inotify's interface is a system call that returns a fd, not SIGIO.
	  You get a single fd, which is select()-able.
        * inotify has an event that says "the filesystem that the item
          you were watching is on was unmounted."
        * inotify can watch directories or files.

Inotify is currently used by Beagle (a desktop search infrastructure),
Gamin (a FAM replacement), and other projects.

See Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt.

Signed-off-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Cc: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/user.c b/kernel/user.c
index 734575d55769..89e562feb1b1 100644
--- a/kernel/user.c
+++ b/kernel/user.c
@@ -120,6 +120,10 @@ struct user_struct * alloc_uid(uid_t uid)
 		atomic_set(&new->processes, 0);
 		atomic_set(&new->files, 0);
 		atomic_set(&new->sigpending, 0);
+#ifdef CONFIG_INOTIFY
+		atomic_set(&new->inotify_watches, 0);
+		atomic_set(&new->inotify_devs, 0);
+#endif
 
 		new->mq_bytes = 0;
 		new->locked_shm = 0;