On Dunnersdag 16 Juni 2005 20:25, Robert Love wrote:
> +Q: Why a device node?
> +
> +A: The second biggest problem with dnotify is that the user
> +interface sucks ass. Signals are a terrible, terrible interface
> +for file notification. Or for anything, for that matter. The
> +idea solution, from all perspectives, is a file descriptor based
> +one that allows basic file I/O and poll/select. Obtaining the
> +fd and managing the watches could of been done either via a
> +device file or a family of new system calls. We decided to
> +implement a device file because adding three or four new system
> +calls that mirrored open, close, and ioctl seemed silly. A
> +character device makes sense from user-space and was easy to
> +implement inside of the kernel.
Sorry to bring up a topic that should have been settled a long time ago.
I found that the interface consisting of
- open a handle
- add a file descriptor with an event mask to handle
- remove a file/watch descriptor from handle
- wait on handle, get events
- close handle
in inotify is _very_ similar to how epoll is represented to user
space. Is there a good reason that epoll is a set of syscalls while
inotify is a character device, or is one of them simply wrong?
Arnd <><
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