Re: [1/1] Use pid in inotify events.

[Evgeniy Polyakov]

Hi Michael.

On Sat, Nov 08, 2008 at 11:58:30AM -0500, Michael Kerrisk (mtk.manpages@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> It's perhaps unfortunate that the structure wasn't padded out with a
> few additional fields "for future use".  But -- maybe it is not really
> true that we can't change things.  Two things to consider:
> 
> a) We now (since 2.6.27) have an inotify_init1() which has a flags argument.
> b) There are spare bits in the mask argument of inotify_add_watch()
> 
> We could use a flag in either of these to say that we want a different
> structure returned on read() from the inotify descriptor.  In the
> first case, this would be a global setting for all inotify events on
> that descriptor.  In the second, we could do it on a per-watch basis
> (I'm not so sure that that is a nice idea).  Since we are in any case
> extending the ABI, and new applications would need to be taught about
> the extension, it seems we could consider either of the alternative
> extensions I mentioned, which woul also allow the PID to be obtained
> for rename() events.  What do you think?

This may be a good idea for some serious ABI change. I think we could
extend it even more to include IO offset/size into events and attribute
changes.

-- 
	Evgeniy Polyakov
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