[GSOC] Questions about the project goal of VFS change notify support

[Alex Liu]

Hi, jlayton and sfrench,

As I looked more closely to the CIFS/SMB2 protocol, I realized that
the NT_TRANSACT_NOTIFY_CHANGE and SMB2 CHANGE_NOTIFY commands are
designed only for directory change notification[1][2]. There is no
(single) file change notification mechanism per protocol design.

I am currently designing the cifs inotify support anyway. But I think
it will be way too complicated and go beyond the design of CIFS/SMB2
protocols. As a result, there would be a high possibility that the
part of code can never get merged. I'm not sure if supporting inotify
in CIFS is a good idea, given that CIFS/SMB2 protocols don't support
it from the beginning.

jlayton said yesterday on IRC that the original purpose of the project
is to bring back what was ripped out by commit 6badd79b. Commit
6badd79b is only about dnotify. So I'm wondering if removing inotify
support really matters. And if you could shed some light on the final
goals of the project, we students can have a better understanding of
what we are going to do.

Thanks!

refs:
[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee441586%28v=PROT.10%29.aspx
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc246602%28v=PROT.13%29.aspx

Cheers,
-Alex