Re: VFS event hooks
Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Sat, 26 Jun 1999 09:05:11 -0700 (PDT)
On Sun, 27 Jun 1999, Richard Gooch wrote:
>
> Dale Amon writes:
> > I'd love to see the like under Linux as well. In USER
> > land. There is very little that has any place in the
> > kernel. One exception is an item on another thread:
> > a signal that tells you when a file is written. That
> > is very useful, perhaps essential, for NeXTstep type
> > GUI's.
>
> There's merit in that idea. It's in keeping with the principle of
> having the kernel export information it has to keep anyway to user
> space so that user space doesn't have to waste resources regenerating
> this information.
This is what "poll" is for: it would not be overly hard to add a new
POLL_XXX type that says "the underlying data has changed", and make
directories and regular files honour that.
I would refuse to add some new mechanism when poll() fits the bill so well
(you can't use select() or any of the existing poll flags, because they
have specified behaviour).
Linus
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/