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

[Michael Kerrisk]

Hi Evgeniy,

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 10:20 AM, Evgeniy Polyakov <zbr@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.

Are you going to revise your patch to use this idea?

Cheers,

Michael

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git
man-pages online: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online_pages.html
Found a bug? http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/