Red Hat Volleys New Patches For Exposing More File-System Info + Mount Notifications

Longtime Linux kernel developer David Howells of Red Hat sent out his latest patch revision exposing new capabilities for exposing more VFS and mount information to user-space along with notification support for any file-system mount topology changes.

One part of the patch series is the fsinfo() system call for exposing more VFS / file-system information for a particular path/mount point. This system call could expose information like file-system UUIDs, capabilities of the file-system, mount attributes, and other data.

The other portion of the work is the watch_mount() system call for supporting notifications should the file-system mount topology change or any super-block attributes altered or other events. This also involves watch_sb() as a third new system call for watching specifically superblock changes like file-system errors or going from read-write to read-only.

With these newest patches, sample code is now introduced for EXT4 and NFS along with other fixes over earlier revisions. Hopefully we'll see these useful additions readied in time for introduction this spring with Linux 5.7.