Samba project aspirant for GSOC 2014

[Christopher R. Hertel]

I may be the one confused here, but just to be clear...

When the Samba Team talk about the "Samba VFS" we mean the VFS layer within
Samba itself.  This is not the in-kernel VFS, but a mechanism by which Samba
can be integrated more closely with an underlying file system.

The CIFSFS is an in-kernel file system that uses the in-kernel VFS to
integrate itself with Linux.  The CIFSFS is maintained by members of the
Samba Team, kernel developers, etc.

If Al pulled the support for change notify from the CIFSFS kernel module
five years ago, then I would suspect that such support has been rewritten by
now.  I don't know for sure.  If not, then it would be a nice feature to have.

Chris -)-----

On 03/19/2014 12:22 PM, Saket Sinha wrote:
> Hi Richard,
> 
> Please find my response inline-
> 
>>> 1. To modify the Samba VFS to support change notify if the underlying
>>> file system supports it? In this case, it is my understanding that the
>>> VFS already contains such support.
> 
> The VFS supports this feature but according to the patchsets that I
> went through in which Al-Viro ripped support for the same in CIFS,
> there are changes needed in the VFS to bring it back to CIFS. This is
> my understanding after going through Al-Viro's patch. Correct me, if I
> am wrong.
> 
> You can follow the discussion from the Samba mailing list at the below
> link for the same-
> https://lists.samba.org/archive/linux-cifs-client/2009-January/thread.html#3938
>  under the thread "[linux-cifs-client] [PATCH] cifs: remove dnotify
> thread code "
> 
>>> To modify the CIFSFS to pass through change-notify events to
>>> inotify requests that applications might be using?
> 
> If I can understand your question correctly, I can only answer that
> inotify support has to provided in the lower filesystems too not just
> the VFS(which it currently has) to enable this feature.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Saket Sinha
>