Re: Notifications on kernel events

[Nick Hill <nikhilwiz@xxxxxxxxx>]

SGI has done some stuff on this. They have something called fam.
See http://oss.sgi.com/projects/fam/ for more info. to quote the docs:

fam was originally written for IRIX by Bruce Karsh in 1988-89.  It was
rewritten in 1995 by Bob Miller.  Changes & bug-fixes for the open-
source version were done by Roger Chickering, Wes Smith, and Rusty
Ballinger.
imon, the kernel portion, was written in 1989 by Wiltse Carpenter.
The imon port to Linux was done by Roger Chickering.  The inventors on
the FAM patent are Wiltse Carpenter, Brendan Eich, Bruce Karsh, and Eva
Manolis.

efm (E fileman) uses this as an alternative to the clumsy select/poll
stuff. But, i think FreeBSD's kevent() is more flexible than fam, but
YMMV. 

Nikhil.

On Mon, Nov 20, 2000 at 07:32:09PM -0800, Arun Sharma wrote:
> There were some threads here about a user program getting notified
> when a particular file was read or some kernel level event happened.
> 
> FreeBSD's implementation of kqueue/kevent accomplishes that task:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=kqueue&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+5.0-current&format=html
> 
> There was discussion on the linux-kernel too, but Linus trashed
> the kevent API as being too cumbersome.
> 
> [ Search "Linus kevent" in: http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml ]
> 
> The intent of the kevent API was to provide alternatives to select/poll,
> both of which are inefficient (O(n) scans) for large number of
> handles/descriptors.
> 
> 	-Arun
> 
> 
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