Features/fanotify

= fanotify =

Summary
A new filesystem notification system, like inotify, only instead of arbitrary watch descriptors, events come with an open file descriptor to the object in question.

Owner

 * Name: Eric Paris
 * email: eparis@redhat.com

Current status

 * Targeted release: 12
 * Last updated: July 21, 2009
 * Percentage of completion: 50%

Detailed Description
A kernel patch to enable fanotify. fanotify is a new notification and access control system designed to allow system wide notification. It meets this goal by supplying the notification listener with both an open fd and an event type. There are no races or need to hold open arbitrary numbers of directories to get all events on a system. It also allows for access decisions or access delays to be made. This allows support for on access anti-malware scanners and storage management in which data can be removed from the FS an stored other places, like tape!

Benefit to Fedora
Readahead is the only know proposed in fedora user. A number of out of system users have shown interest.

Scope
Need to get the patches accepted upstream. If they are accepted into the upstream kernel I will backport them to the fedora kernel.

How To Test

 * No testing plan at the moment, although with upstream submission will be basic test cases.
 * FIXME

User Experience
This should be behind the scenes to a user. It will hopefully one day do things like decrease the workload of updatedb and desktop indexing, but for F12 just the infrastructure is planned.

Dependencies
kernel only

Contingency Plan
None necessary.

Documentation

 * FIXME'--I have to write it....

Release Notes

 * FIXME--Not yet.

Comments and Discussion

 * See Talk:Features/fanotify