Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [PATCH] arch speedups on big trees

[Robin Green]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 10:20:34AM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 02:09:28PM -0800, Tom Lord wrote:
> > That possibility -- the "smart file system" -- sure sounds exotic and
> > unlikely but I _can_ see it being worthwhile.   If you wanted to make
> > a distro that was _really_ _really_ tuned for developers .....

Exotic and unlikely?

Well, actually, the Linux and Irix kernels, for example, both support
userland notification of inode modification events.

Of course, that's unlikely to work properly with remote NFS shares,
I would imagine - unless NFS _also_ has such a feature.

> Well, there's fam <http://oss.sgi.com/projects/fam/>.

fam supports both DNotify (the Linux >=2.4 file alteration kernel
notifier) and the Irix method. The fam FAQ states:

"On other platforms, see if a similar kernel monitor is available,
and add support for it in FAM. For example, FreeBSD's kqueue feature
could be used in FAM." [1]

It looks like prima facie the way to go is to use fam to leverage
its support for optimisations on multiple platforms, rather than
reinventing that particular wheel, and then those who want to can
work on adding kqueue support to fam (if that FAQ isn't already
out of date).

-- 
Robin

[1] http://oss.sgi.com/projects/fam/faq.html


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