Bug 53161

Summary:	inotify support for NFS
Product:	File System	Reporter:	hrjet (hrjet9)
Component:	NFS	Assignee:	Trond Myklebust (trondmy)
Status:	CLOSED WILL_NOT_FIX
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P1
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Kernel Version:		Subsystem:
Regression:	No	Bisected commit-id:

Description hrjet 2013-01-29 05:33:22 UTC

This is a feature request. I am not a kernel hacker, so my description might not be very accurate.

"Please support inotify on NFS."

From what I understand, NFS server can't advertise file system changes to client, but the client can eventually discover when files are changed.

Can this information be eventually transmitted to inotify clients? 

My use-case:

I have a virtual box which mounts a filesystem from the host via NFS. The virtual box is running a continuous compilation job which needs to get triggered whenever a file on the NFS filesystem is modified.

For my use-case, deferred notification is better than polling, because the virtual box takes up a lot of CPU resources when polling.

Comment 1 Trond Myklebust 2013-01-29 17:18:08 UTC

No...

Comment 2 Trond Myklebust 2013-01-29 17:36:00 UTC

Firstly, feature requests should go the linux-nfs mailing list, not bugzilla.

Secondly, this issue has been discussed to death on said mailing list
and others already. inotify doesn't scale, and particularly not over a
network.

Thirdly, there are already utilities such as gamin and FAM that implement
inotify-like functionality as a sideband protocol for the purposes of the
most common applications.