Re: [PATCH] fs: don't remove inotify watchers from alive inode-s (v2)

From: Jan Kara
Date: Thu Oct 02 2014 - 06:45:59 EST


On Thu 25-09-14 10:30:10, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Wed 24-09-14 13:19:47, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:51:55 +0200 Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > Andrew, what do you think about the patch below? Al objected that it
> > > changes userspace visible behavior some time ago and then he didn't react
> > > to our explanations...
> >
> > Difficult situation. There's some really important information missing
> > from the changelog:
> >
> > - Who cares? Is there some real application which is hurting from
> > the current situation? If so, who, what, how and why. If not, then
> > why change anything?
> I believe Openvz guys hit this in their application but I'll defer to
> them for more details.
>
> > - A description of the userspace API change impact. How did the
> > interface change? What is the risk of this change causing damage to
> > real applications?
> I believe this was covered in the changelog. Without the patch depending
> on the order of unlinks for hardlinked file you sometimes get events:
> 4 (IN_ATTRIB)
> 400 (IN_DELETE_SELF)
> 8000 (IN_IGNORED)
>
> and sometimes you get events:
> 4 (IN_ATTRIB)
> <possibly more events happening for unlinked file>
> 8 (IN_CLOSE_WRITE)
> 400 (IN_DELETE_SELF)
> 8000 (IN_IGNORED)
>
> With the patch you'll always have the second case. So without the patch you
> don't receive some events if the file has at least 2 hardlinks and then
> gets unlinked. I think the risk that some application relies on *not* getting
> those events is pretty low (especially since in the common case of file
> without hardlinks you will get all those events).
Ping Andrew? Do you still need more info or are you now OK to merge the
patch?

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx>
SUSE Labs, CR
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