Hi Andy.
Andy MacNamara wrote:
I'm new to this project, I saw it on Enlightenment's page, and I have some
questions:
(All of these questions deal with FAM with the IMon backend, not polling.)
1) What's the status on kernel acceptance?
IMon is unlikely to be included in the standard kernel distribution.
The latest IMon patch we have is for 2.4.7 if I remember correctly.
An alternative to IMon on Linux is DNotify. This seems to be the best
option for the future, rather than having us maintain Linux IMon
patches. You can find a patch adding DNotify support to FAM in our
downloads area.
2) Can you disable the network use as a configuration option, i.e. if you
want to turn off the remote FAM use?
We had been looking at an option to not monitor any file systems that
were too slow (e.g. some remote NFS mounts) to monitor. If a list of
file systems could be specified as a configuration option, would this
provide what you want? What exactly did you want? Did you want FAM to
not generate *any* traffic at all (remember this means we have to turn
of a lot of things, such as NIS lookups)?
3) What is the internal API like? The reason I am wondering is, I was
thinking about looking into support for device driver notification, as in
Windows 2000, where if you unplug your network cable it lets you know. Is
this supported, first of all, and how hard would it be to hack in? I was
thinking along the lines of a /proc entry for the device driver which
a userspace process could then use FAM on... obviously I'd need to hack
the device driver, but how feasible is this?
At first this sounded like it'd be pretty difficult, but maybe it would
be feasible to simply monitor the /proc entry, and FAM would send a
Changed event, so the client could check what changed and act
accordingly. On the other hand, if the /proc entry frequently changed
(with information such as packets transmitted, packets dropped, etc.),
then you'd get an overwhelming number of Changed events, making the
whole idea a bit more difficult.
Sorry I can't be more helpful on this one.
4) If you use FAM on a directory, and a file is created inside it, will
the library let you know which file was created, or is the program then
responsible for rereading the entire directory?
Yes, FAM will notify the client that a file was created, returning a
struct including the new file name. This only applies to files created
at that level (i.e. it does not report files created in subdirectories).
I think it's pretty easy to see exactly what happens if you run the test
program supplied (in the test subdirectory of the source distribution).
I hope this helped.
--
MICHAEL WARDLE
SGI Desktop and Admin Software
Adacel Technologies Limited
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