This allocation can be as large as 64k.
- Add __GFP_NOWARN so the a falied kmalloc() is silent
- Fall back to vmalloc() if the kmalloc() failed
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Dave Jones <davej@codemonkey.org.uk>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This allocation can be as large as 64k. As David points out, "falling
back to vmalloc here is much better solution than failing to retreive
the attribute - it will work no matter how fragmented memory gets. That
means we don't get incomplete backups occurring after days or months of
uptime and successful backups".
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Dave Jones <davej@codemonkey.org.uk>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This size is user controllable, up to a maximum of XATTR_LIST_MAX (64k).
So it's trivial for someone to trigger a stream of order:4 page
allocation errors.
Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
For files only using THIS_MODULE and/or EXPORT_SYMBOL, map
them onto including export.h -- or if the file isn't even
using those, then just delete the include. Fix up any implicit
include dependencies that were being masked by module.h along
the way.
Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
vfs_getxattr_alloc() and vfs_xattr_cmp() are two new kernel xattr helper
functions. vfs_getxattr_alloc() first allocates memory for the requested
xattr and then retrieves it. vfs_xattr_cmp() compares a given value with
the contents of an extended attribute.
Signed-off-by: Mimi Zohar <zohar@us.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com>
Some recent benchmarking on btrfs showed that a major scaling bottleneck
on large systems on btrfs is currently the xattr lookup on every write.
Why xattr lookup on every write I hear you ask?
write wants to drop suid and security related xattrs that could set o
capabilities for executables. To do that it currently looks up
security.capability on EVERY write (even for non executables) to decide
whether to drop it or not.
In btrfs this causes an additional tree walk, hitting some per file system
locks and quite bad scalability. In a simple read workload on a 8S
system I saw over 90% CPU time in spinlocks related to that.
Chris Mason tells me this is also a problem in ext4, where it hits
the global mbcache lock.
This patch adds a simple per inode to avoid this problem. We only
do the lookup once per file and then if there is no xattr cache
the decision. All xattr changes clear the flag.
I also used the same flag to avoid the suid check, although
that one is pretty cheap.
A file system can also set this flag when it creates the inode,
if it has a cheap way to do so. This is done for some common file systems
in followon patches.
With this patch a major part of the lock contention disappears
for btrfs. Some testing on smaller systems didn't show significant
performance changes, but at least it helps the larger systems
and is generally more efficient.
v2: Rename is_sgid. add file system helper.
Cc: chris.mason@oracle.com
Cc: josef@redhat.com
Cc: viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk
Cc: agruen@linbit.com
Cc: Serge E. Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Return -ENODATA when trying to read a user.* attribute which cannot
exist: user space otherwise does not have a reasonable way to
distinguish between non-existent and inaccessible attributes.
Likewise, return -ENODATA when an unprivileged process tries to read a
trusted.* attribute: to unprivileged processes, those attributes are
invisible (listxattr() won't include them).
Related to this bug report: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/660613
Signed-off-by: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
For some reason generic_setxattr() did not pass flags (XATTR_CREATE,
XATTR_REPLACE) to the filesystem specific helper. This caused that
setxattr(2) syscall just ignored these flags.
Fix the bug by passing flags correctly.
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
And give it a kernel-doc comment.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: btrfs changed in linux-next]
Signed-off-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Daniel Lezcano <daniel.lezcano@free.fr>
Acked-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The entries in xattr handler table should be immutable (ie const)
like other operation tables.
Later patches convert common filesystems. Uncoverted filesystems
will still work, but will generate a compiler warning.
Signed-off-by: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Add a flags argument to struct xattr_handler and pass it to all xattr
handler methods. This allows using the same methods for multiple
handlers, e.g. for the ACL methods which perform exactly the same action
for the access and default ACLs, just using a different underlying
attribute. With a little more groundwork it'll also allow sharing the
methods for the regular user/trusted/secure handlers in extN, ocfs2 and
jffs2 like it's already done for xfs in this patch.
Also change the inode argument to the handlers to a dentry to allow
using the handlers mechnism for filesystems that require it later,
e.g. cifs.
[with GFS2 bits updated by Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Acked-by: Joel Becker <joel.becker@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
This factors out the part of the vfs_setxattr function that performs the
setting of the xattr and its notification. This is needed so the SELinux
implementation of inode_setsecctx can handle the setting of the xattr while
maintaining the proper separation of layers.
Signed-off-by: David P. Quigley <dpquigl@tycho.nsa.gov>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
This patch speeds up lmbench lat_mmap test by about another 2% after the
first patch.
Before:
avg = 462.286
std = 5.46106
After:
avg = 453.12
std = 9.58257
(50 runs of each, stddev gives a reasonable confidence)
It does this by introducing mnt_clone_write, which avoids some heavyweight
operations of mnt_want_write if called on a vfsmount which we know already
has a write count; and mnt_want_write_file, which can call mnt_clone_write
if the file is open for write.
After these two patches, mnt_want_write and mnt_drop_write go from 7% on
the profile down to 1.3% (including mnt_clone_write).
[AV: mnt_want_write_file() should take file alone and derive mnt from it;
not only all callers have that form, but that's the only mnt about which
we know that it's already held for write if file is opened for write]
Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Convert all system calls to return a long. This should be a NOP since all
converted types should have the same size anyway.
With the exception of sys_exit_group which returned void. But that doesn't
matter since the system call doesn't return.
Signed-off-by: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
We used to have rather schizophrenic set of checks for NULL ->i_op even
though it had been eliminated years ago. You'd need to go out of your
way to set it to NULL explicitly _and_ a bunch of code would die on
such inodes anyway. After killing two remaining places that still
did that bogosity, all that crap can go away.
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
* do not pass nameidata; struct path is all the callers want.
* switch to new helpers:
user_path_at(dfd, pathname, flags, &path)
user_path(pathname, &path)
user_lpath(pathname, &path)
user_path_dir(pathname, &path) (fail if not a directory)
The last 3 are trivial macro wrappers for the first one.
* remove nameidata in callers.
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Add missing consts to xattr function arguments.
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This basically audits the callers of xattr_permission(), which calls
permission() and can perform writes to the filesystem.
[AV: add missing parts - removexattr() and nfsd posix acls, plug for a leak
spotted by Miklos]
Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
* Add path_put() functions for releasing a reference to the dentry and
vfsmount of a struct path in the right order
* Switch from path_release(nd) to path_put(&nd->path)
* Rename dput_path() to path_put_conditional()
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix cifs]
Signed-off-by: Jan Blunck <jblunck@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de>
Acked-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Steven French <sfrench@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This is the central patch of a cleanup series. In most cases there is no good
reason why someone would want to use a dentry for itself. This series reflects
that fact and embeds a struct path into nameidata.
Together with the other patches of this series
- it enforced the correct order of getting/releasing the reference count on
<dentry,vfsmount> pairs
- it prepares the VFS for stacking support since it is essential to have a
struct path in every place where the stack can be traversed
- it reduces the overall code size:
without patch series:
text data bss dec hex filename
5321639 858418 715768 6895825 6938d1 vmlinux
with patch series:
text data bss dec hex filename
5320026 858418 715768 6894212 693284 vmlinux
This patch:
Switch from nd->{dentry,mnt} to nd->path.{dentry,mnt} everywhere.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix cifs]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix smack]
Signed-off-by: Jan Blunck <jblunck@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de>
Acked-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Originally vfs_getxattr would pull the security xattr variable using
the inode getxattr handle and then proceed to clobber it with a subsequent call
to the LSM.
This patch reorders the two operations such that when the xattr requested is
in the security namespace it first attempts to grab the value from the LSM
directly.
If it fails to obtain the value because there is no module present or the
module does not support the operation it will fall back to using the inode
getxattr operation.
In the event that both are inaccessible it returns EOPNOTSUPP.
Signed-off-by: David P. Quigley <dpquigl@tycho.nsa.gov>
Cc: Stephen Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov>
Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Acked-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This patch modifies the interface to inode_getsecurity to have the function
return a buffer containing the security blob and its length via parameters
instead of relying on the calling function to give it an appropriately sized
buffer.
Security blobs obtained with this function should be freed using the
release_secctx LSM hook. This alleviates the problem of the caller having to
guess a length and preallocate a buffer for this function allowing it to be
used elsewhere for Labeled NFS.
The patch also removed the unused err parameter. The conversion is similar to
the one performed by Al Viro for the security_getprocattr hook.
Signed-off-by: David P. Quigley <dpquigl@tycho.nsa.gov>
Cc: Stephen Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov>
Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Acked-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Introduce is_owner_or_cap() macro in fs.h, and convert over relevant
users to it. This is done because we want to avoid bugs in the future
where we check for only effective fsuid of the current task against a
file's owning uid, without simultaneously checking for CAP_FOWNER as
well, thus violating its semantics.
[ XFS uses special macros and structures, and in general looked ...
untouchable, so we leave it alone -- but it has been looked over. ]
The (current->fsuid != inode->i_uid) check in generic_permission() and
exec_permission_lite() is left alone, because those operations are
covered by CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE and CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH. Similarly operations
falling under the purview of CAP_CHOWN and CAP_LEASE are also left alone.
Signed-off-by: Satyam Sharma <ssatyam@cse.iitk.ac.in>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>
Acked-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Collect inode info for the remaining xattr syscalls that operate on a file
descriptor. These don't call a path_lookup variant, so they aren't covered by
the general audit hook.
Signed-off-by: Amy Griffis <amy.griffis@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Remove includes of <linux/smp_lock.h> where it is not used/needed.
Suggested by Al Viro.
Builds cleanly on x86_64, i386, alpha, ia64, powerpc, sparc,
sparc64, and arm (all 59 defconfigs).
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This patch changes struct file to use struct path instead of having
independent pointers to struct dentry and struct vfsmount, and converts all
users of f_{dentry,vfsmnt} in fs/ to use f_path.{dentry,mnt}.
Additionally, it adds two #define's to make the transition easier for users of
the f_dentry and f_vfsmnt.
Signed-off-by: Josef "Jeff" Sipek <jsipek@cs.sunysb.edu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The user.* extended attributes are only allowed on regular files and
directories. Sticky directories further restrict write access to the owner
and privileged users. (See the attr(5) man page for an explanation.)
The original check in ext2/ext3 when user.* xattrs were merged was more
restrictive than intended, and when the xattr permission checks were moved
into the VFS, read access to user.* attributes on sticky directores ended
up being denied in addition.
Originally-from: Gerard Neil <xyzzy@devferret.org>
Signed-off-by: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de>
Cc: Dave Kleikamp <shaggy@austin.ibm.com>
Cc: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@linux01.gwdg.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This patch moves code out of fs/xattr.c:listxattr into a new function -
vfs_listxattr. The code for vfs_listxattr was originally submitted by Bill
Nottingham <notting@redhat.com> to Unionfs.
Sorry about that. The reason for this submission is to make the
listxattr code in fs/xattr.c a little cleaner (as well as to clean up
some code in Unionfs.)
Currently, Unionfs has vfs_listxattr defined in its code. I think
that's very ugly, and I'd like to see it (re)moved. The logical place
to put it, is along side of all the other vfs_*xattr functions.
Overall, I think this patch is benefitial for both kernel.org kernel and
Unionfs.
Signed-off-by: Josef "Jeff" Sipek <jsipek@cs.sunysb.edu>
Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This patch augments the collection of inode info during syscall
processing. It represents part of the functionality that was provided
by the auditfs patch included in RHEL4.
Specifically, it:
- Collects information for target inodes created or removed during
syscalls. Previous code only collects information for the target
inode's parent.
- Adds the audit_inode() hook to syscalls that operate on a file
descriptor (e.g. fchown), enabling audit to do inode filtering for
these calls.
- Modifies filtering code to check audit context for either an inode #
or a parent inode # matching a given rule.
- Modifies logging to provide inode # for both parent and child.
- Protect debug info from NULL audit_names.name.
[AV: folded a later typo fix from the same author]
Signed-off-by: Amy Griffis <amy.griffis@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
)
From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
The xattr code has rather complex permission checks because the rules are very
different for different attribute namespaces. This patch moves as much as we
can into the generic code. Currently all the major disk based filesystems
duplicate these checks, while many minor filesystems or network filesystems
lack some or all of them.
To do this we need defines for the extended attribute names in common code, I
moved them up from JFS which had the nicest defintions.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Acked-by: Dave Kleikamp <shaggy@austin.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Add vfs_getxattr, vfs_setxattr and vfs_removexattr helpers for common checks
around invocation of the xattr methods. NFSD already was missing some of the
checks and there will be more soon.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
(James, I haven't touched selinux yet because it's doing various odd things
and I'm not sure how it would interact with the security attribute fallbacks
you added. Could you investigate whether it could use vfs_getxattr or if not
add a __vfs_getxattr helper to share the bits it is fine with?)
For NFSv4: instead of just converting it add an nfsd_getxattr helper for the
code shared by NFSv2/3 and NFSv4 ACLs. In fact that code isn't even
NFS-specific, but I'll wait for more users to pop up first before moving it to
common code.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Acked-by: Dave Kleikamp <shaggy@austin.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
Signed-off-by: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This patch converts the inode semaphore to a mutex. I have tested it on
XFS and compiled as much as one can consider on an ia64. Anyway your
luck with it might be different.
Modified-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
(finished the conversion)
Signed-off-by: Jes Sorensen <jes@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Commit f549d6c18c introduced a generic
fallback for security xattrs, but appears to include a subtle bug.
Gentoo users with kernels with selinux compiled in, and coreutils compiled
with acl support, noticed that they could not copy files on tmpfs using
'cp'.
cp (compiled with acl support) copies the file, lists the extended
attributes on the old file, copies them all to the new file, and then
exits. However the listxattr() calls were failing with this odd behaviour:
llistxattr("a.out", (nil), 0) = 17
llistxattr("a.out", 0x7fffff8c6cb0, 17) = -1 ERANGE (Numerical result out of
range)
I believe this is a simple problem in the logic used to check the buffer
sizes; if the user sends a buffer the exact size of the data, then its ok
:)
This change solves the problem.
More info can be found at http://bugs.gentoo.org/113138
Signed-off-by: Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org>
Acked-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Acked-by: Stephen Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This is the fs/ part of the big kfree cleanup patch.
Remove pointless checks for NULL prior to calling kfree() in fs/.
Signed-off-by: Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This patch allows SELinux to canonicalize the value returned from
getxattr() via the security_inode_getsecurity() hook, which is called after
the fs level getxattr() function.
The purpose of this is to allow the in-core security context for an inode
to override the on-disk value. This could happen in cases such as
upgrading a system to a different labeling form (e.g. standard SELinux to
MLS) without needing to do a full relabel of the filesystem.
In such cases, we want getxattr() to return the canonical security context
that the kernel is using rather than what is stored on disk.
The implementation hooks into the inode_getsecurity(), adding another
parameter to indicate the result of the preceding fs-level getxattr() call,
so that SELinux knows whether to compare a value obtained from disk with
the kernel value.
We also now allow getxattr() to work for mountpoint labeled filesystems
(i.e. mount with option context=foo_t), as we are able to return the
kernel value to the user.
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Signed-off-by: Stephen Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Add fsnotify_xattr() hook to removexattr().
Signed-off-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Signed-off-by: John McCtuchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Cc: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This patch modifies the VFS setxattr, getxattr, and listxattr code to fall
back to the security module for security xattrs if the filesystem does not
support xattrs natively. This allows security modules to export the incore
inode security label information to userspace even if the filesystem does
not provide xattr storage, and eliminates the need to individually patch
various pseudo filesystem types to provide such access. The patch removes
the existing xattr code from devpts and tmpfs as it is then no longer
needed.
The patch restructures the code flow slightly to reduce duplication between
the normal path and the fallback path, but this should only have one
user-visible side effect - a program may get -EACCES rather than
-EOPNOTSUPP if policy denied access but the filesystem didn't support the
operation anyway. Note that the post_setxattr hook call is not needed in
the fallback case, as the inode_setsecurity hook call handles the incore
inode security state update directly. In contrast, we do call fsnotify in
both cases.
Signed-off-by: Stephen Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov>
Acked-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
inotify is intended to correct the deficiencies of dnotify, particularly
its inability to scale and its terrible user interface:
* dnotify requires the opening of one fd per each directory
that you intend to watch. This quickly results in too many
open files and pins removable media, preventing unmount.
* dnotify is directory-based. You only learn about changes to
directories. Sure, a change to a file in a directory affects
the directory, but you are then forced to keep a cache of
stat structures.
* dnotify's interface to user-space is awful. Signals?
inotify provides a more usable, simple, powerful solution to file change
notification:
* inotify's interface is a system call that returns a fd, not SIGIO.
You get a single fd, which is select()-able.
* inotify has an event that says "the filesystem that the item
you were watching is on was unmounted."
* inotify can watch directories or files.
Inotify is currently used by Beagle (a desktop search infrastructure),
Gamin (a FAM replacement), and other projects.
See Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt.
Signed-off-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Cc: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
