Subject: imon in NetBSD?
To: None <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv@menta.net>
List: tech-kern
Date: 01/08/2005 23:49:23
Hi all,

I've been adding kqueue support to famd, but it looks like to be less
than optimal (it can be useful for a desktop system, but not much more).
There are multiple problems with kqueue when it comes to achieve similar
imon behavior as seen in the following link:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2003-October/003875.html

Also there is one other serious issue.  kqueue works by monitoring open
file descriptors, while imon works with path names.  So imon can easily
monitor a big amount of files, but doing the same thing with kqueue can
be problematic (you need to increase kern.maxfiles).  Just consider
monitoring a big Maildir (and I think courier-imap is able do do this
using famd).

Some of the issues described in the link shown above could be fixed by
adding extra functionality to kqueue.  But others are impossible to
fix cleanly.

Could people be against having imon in NetBSD, given that we already
have kqueue?  If not, this is something I might _try_ to do next month :)

Cheers,

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv@menta.net>
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jmmv/
The NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/