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122 points ashvardanian | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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jchw ◴[] No.42175191[source]
io_uring and Linux's many different types of file descriptors are great. I mean, I personally think that the explicit large API surface of WinNT is kinda nicer than jamming a bunch of weird functionality into files and file descriptors like Linux, but when things work, they do show some nice advantages of unifying everything to some framework, ill-fitting as it may sometimes be (Though now that I say this, it's not like WinNT Objects are really any different here, they just offer more advanced baseline functionality like ACLs). io_uring and it's ability to tie together a lot of pre-existing things in new ways is pretty cool. UNIX never really had a story for async operations, something I will not fault an OS designed 50 years ago for. However, still not having a decent story for async operations today is harder to excuse. I've been excited to learn about io_uring. I've learned a lot listening to conference talk recordings about it. While it has its issues (like the many times it (semi-?)accidentally bypassed security subsystems...) it has some really cool and substantial benefits.

I'll tell you what I would love to see next: a successor to inotify that does not involve opening one zillion file descriptors to watch a recursive subtree. I'm sure there are valid reasons why it's not easy to just make it happen, but it feels like it will be a major improvement in a lot of use cases. And in many cases, it would probably fix the dreaded problem of users needing to fight against ulimits, especially in text editors like VSCode.

I don't have anything of great substance to say about the actual subject of the article. It feels a bit late to finally get this functionality proper in Linux after NT had it basically forever, but any improvement is welcome. Next time I'm doing something where I want to wait on a bunch of FDs I will have to try this approach.

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iknowstuff ◴[] No.42176604[source]
fanotify?

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/fanotify.7.html

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jchw ◴[] No.42176965[source]
It feels like last time I looked into this, fanotify was for some reason not suitable for most inotify use cases. Maybe this has changed. Would be great news if so.
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1. claudex ◴[] No.42180608[source]
Depends on when was the last time you look at it:

> In the original fanotify API, only a limited set of events was supported. In particular, there was no support for create, delete, and move events. The support for those events was added in Linux 5.1. (See inotify(7) for details of an API that did notify those events pre Linux 5.1.)