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git-mirror/contrib
Paul Tarjan 149c19ba1b fsmonitor: implement filesystem change listener for Linux
Implement the built-in fsmonitor daemon for Linux using the inotify
API, bringing it to feature parity with the existing Windows and macOS
implementations.

The implementation uses inotify rather than fanotify because fanotify
requires either CAP_SYS_ADMIN or CAP_PERFMON capabilities, making it
unsuitable for an unprivileged user-space daemon.  While inotify has
the limitation of requiring a separate watch on every directory (unlike
macOS's FSEvents, which can monitor an entire directory tree with a
single watch), it operates without elevated privileges and provides
the per-file event granularity needed for fsmonitor.

The listener uses inotify_init1(O_NONBLOCK) with a poll loop that
checks for events with a 50-millisecond timeout, keeping the inotify
queue well-drained to minimize the risk of overflows.  Bidirectional
hashmaps map between watch descriptors and directory paths for efficient
event resolution.  Directory renames are tracked using inotify's cookie
mechanism to correlate IN_MOVED_FROM and IN_MOVED_TO event pairs; a
periodic check detects stale renames where the matching IN_MOVED_TO
never arrived, forcing a resync.

New directory creation triggers recursive watch registration to ensure
all subdirectories are monitored.  The IN_MASK_CREATE flag is used
where available to prevent modifying existing watches, with a fallback
for older kernels.  When IN_MASK_CREATE is available and
inotify_add_watch returns EEXIST, it means another thread or recursive
scan has already registered the watch, so it is safe to ignore.

Remote filesystem detection uses statfs() to identify network-mounted
filesystems (NFS, CIFS, SMB, FUSE, etc.) via their magic numbers.
Mount point information is read from /proc/mounts and matched against
the statfs f_fsid to get accurate, human-readable filesystem type names
for logging.  When the .git directory is on a remote filesystem, the
IPC socket falls back to $HOME or a user-configured directory via the
fsmonitor.socketDir setting.

Based-on-patch-by: Eric DeCosta <edecosta@mathworks.com>
Based-on-patch-by: Marziyeh Esipreh <marziyeh.esipreh@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul Tarjan <github@paulisageek.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2026-02-26 07:29:46 -08:00
..
2024-04-05 09:49:38 -07:00

Contributed Software

Although these pieces are available as part of the official git
source tree, they are in somewhat different status.  The
intention is to keep interesting tools around git here, maybe
even experimental ones, to give users an easier access to them,
and to give tools wider exposure, so that they can be improved
faster.

I am not expecting to touch these myself that much.  As far as
my day-to-day operation is concerned, these subdirectories are
owned by their respective primary authors.  I am willing to help
if users of these components and the contrib/ subtree "owners"
have technical/design issues to resolve, but the initiative to
fix and/or enhance things _must_ be on the side of the subtree
owners.  IOW, I won't be actively looking for bugs and rooms for
enhancements in them as the git maintainer -- I may only do so
just as one of the users when I want to scratch my own itch.  If
you have patches to things in contrib/ area, the patch should be
first sent to the primary author, and then the primary author
should ack and forward it to me (git pull request is nicer).
This is the same way as how I have been treating gitk, and to a
lesser degree various foreign SCM interfaces, so you know the
drill.

I expect things that start their life in the contrib/ area
to graduate out of contrib/ once they mature, either by becoming
projects on their own, or moving to the toplevel directory.  On
the other hand, I expect I'll be proposing removal of disused
and inactive ones from time to time.

If you have new things to add to this area, please first propose
it on the git mailing list, and after a list discussion proves
there is general interest (it does not have to be a
list-wide consensus for a tool targeted to a relatively narrow
audience -- for example I do not work with projects whose
upstream is svn, so I have no use for git-svn myself, but it is
of general interest for people who need to interoperate with SVN
repositories in a way git-svn works better than git-svnimport),
submit a patch to create a subdirectory of contrib/ and put your
stuff there.

-jc