linux-kernel - Re: A desktop environment[1] kernel wishlist

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Date:	Tue, 21 Oct 2014 13:11:07 +0000 (UTC)
From:	Sergey <sergey@...mentaryos.org>
To:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: A desktop environment[1] kernel wishlist

Hey everyone,

I'm glad we're having some discussion on this, because we have almost
exactly the same kernel wishlist internally for elementary OS / Pantheon DE.

I believe I can further elaborate on the VFS monitoring part. We need a file
monitoring facility that's scalable (unlike inotify) and can provide a
decent level of detail (unlike fanotify). In particular, we need to be able
to detect file/directory creation, renaming and removal events, as well as
close_write event. And, in an ideal world, all of that without requiring
root permissions.

This can be almost accomplished by combining output of fanotify with that of
a custom LSM module that just reports events to userspace (e.g. rlocate uses
such a thing). There are two problems with this: first, it's a hideous hack,
and second, it doesn't detect deletions.

This is a big deal because without it we're stuck with always presenting the
user with the filesystem. If you've seen library-based music players like
Rhythmbox or Banshee, you know that they group and sort all your music by
artist and album, but not by directory and file name, and that you can
efficiently search all that metadata. We're trying to get the same thing
into more applications, but the absence of VFS features described above is
blocking us. Even after moving all the database management to a single
daemon that does all the monitoring and very rarely has to rescan anything,
the system either slows to a crawl (inotify) or the database gets out of
date quickly (fanotify+LSM). 
In case I didn't make myself clear, a more detailed writeup on the design
can be found here: http://tiny.cc/tearing-up-files

Regarding the other items, AFAIK the kernel implements mechanism, not
policy, so instead of "zswap selectively enabled by default" we just want
"stable reliable zswap". We had to give up on zram previously (in pre-3.10
days) because of kernel regressions leading to panics when zram was enabled.
And we don't have the "Power management" part on our list because we haven't
really delved in that yet. But our lists are identical in all the other
areas, so that's not "just GNOME".

PS: I'm not subscribed to LKML either, so please CC me.

Cheers!

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