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.
No...
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.