WineConf Agenda

[Andrew Tridgell]

Jakob,

 > Linux 2.6 has an API to monitor directory changes right? We could
 > have our own directory list hash in RAM.

Linux 2.4 has that too, but 2.6 has a proposed new interface with
tries to generalise the idea. 

The original interface (dnotify) is used by Samba already, and is
rather similar to the ChangeNotify mechanism that NT has. That's isn't
an accident, as it was developed by Stephen Rothwell and Mathew Wilcox
with some input and testing from me specifically to help Samba
implement ChangeNotify properly :-)

The new interface (inotify) is a bit more general, and may supplant
dnotify, but doesn't change things all that much from our point of
view if I understand it correctly.

Unfortunately it doesn't really help with case-insensitivity, as it is
a non-blocking async interface, so the listeners get told way too
late. Plus you have to have every directory open that you want to
monitor, which would get silly.

There has been a proposal (from Linus and Ingo if I remember
correctly) for a different cache coherence interface from the kernel
that might allow us to maintain a better cache in userspace with
reasonable coherence, but it isn't coded yet. 

Personally I think that keeping a full alternative dcache in userspace
isn't the right approach. I think we could bear the hit of something
that keeps O(number_of_directories) memory, but not
O(number_of_files). The lack of a sensible way to auto-shrink the user
space dcache in low memory situations is just one of the many problems
of a full userspace dcache.

Cheers, Tridge