inotify on Samba4 and clustering

Abhijith Das adas at redhat.com
Tue May 30 21:38:56 GMT 2006


Hi list,
I was looking at the latest Samba4 code and found some use of the 
inotify interface. I was told before that dnotify was being replaced by 
inotify, so this is not a surprise.
However, when I think of a clusterized implementation of inotify for 
GFS, I see complications.
 - An event-watch on one cluster node should be propagated to all nodes.
 - When an event occurs on a different node, we need to somehow write to 
the event-queue of the first node. This could mean some serious hacking.
 - There are way too many events to use a distributed-lock-manager's 
locking for internode communication. A separate userland event/messaging 
framework would have to deal with these event notifications and pass 
them around as necessary.

Is the effort worth the reward? In what situations does samba use 
inotify and what could be the performance impact without inotify support?
An alternate solution could be a local-inotify implementation. We could 
add support in clustered-samba to pass these inotify messages to various 
cluster nodes as appropriate?

Many thanks,
--Abhi


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