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The main problem I have with fuse is inotify not working. If inotify just worked for fuse, I'd just use it. Ideally I could just run the software in a mount namespace with a fuse fs, but I need inotify.

I mainly was trying to use ublk to implement a sort of fuse like thing with the kernel handling the fs and thus having inotify support.

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Interesting, I didn't realize inotify didn't work with FUSE. Is this a flaw in the FUSE interface, or is it just a deficiency in certain FUSE filesystems?

I think the key problem is that mapping from FUSE requests to inotify events requires information that only the FUSE daemon has. For example, lets say you open a file with O_CREAT. Whether this should trigger IN_CREATE depends on whether the file already exists. The kernel doesn't know this, and so couldn't be responsible for generating the IN_CREATE event.

Now, the FUSE daemon could generate the event, but correctly generating events (especially handling edge cases) is difficult.

I was thinking about cases where a filesystem change event doesn't stem from a system call at all, for example, because some other machine wrote to a remote fileserver the daemon provides access to. Is that a problem?

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