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Re: Does Linux Have Better Solution Than "inotify" ?

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c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
> Say you want to promptly duplicate what ever has been writ to your 
> disk on another disk, or remote drive or cloud drive or whatever.
> 
> 'inotify' and its kin can tell you what's changed,

Yep, that is its purpose.

> but it's basically a POLLING sort of operation and

Incorrect.  Inotify is an event driven system.  There is no polling 
(using the standard definiton of "polling" [1]) going on for inotify 
events.

> including an entire drive would be insanely slow.

Yes, but only because setting up the inotify notifications would take a 
while to do, and likely need a fair amount of kernel ram to store them.

But once setup, there is no polling of any form going on.

> It's a sort of localized rsync daemon.

Completely wrong, in so many ways.

> Now SOMEWHERE Linux does put together a filename and destination as 
> it's about to write.  The big question is where, and can users SEE 
> this ?

Inotify.

> SoftRAID software does seem to tap into something like this, so it's 
> THERE, somewhere.  I tried looking at softRAID code but it's huge and 
> only just so well documented.  No luck - I can't find what it's 
> looking at - kernel, driver, who knows ?

Unless it installs a custom kernel module (unlikely) then it is most 
likely using the inotify subsystem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polling_(computer_science)
But as you are well known for having made up your own non-standard 
definitions for CS terms, I felt the need to point to the standard 
definition.

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Thread

Does Linux Have Better Solution Than "inotify" ? c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2026-04-07 20:14 -0400
  Re: Does Linux Have Better Solution Than "inotify" ? Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2026-04-08 03:58 +0000
    Re: Does Linux Have Better Solution Than "inotify" ? c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2026-04-08 13:03 -0400
      Re: Does Linux Have Better Solution Than "inotify" ? Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2026-04-09 21:51 +0000
    Re: Does Linux Have Better Solution Than "inotify" ? Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2026-04-08 18:10 +0100
      Re: Does Linux Have Better Solution Than "inotify" ? c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2026-04-08 13:21 -0400
      Re: Does Linux Have Better Solution Than "inotify" ? Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2026-04-09 21:52 +0000

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