In bug 14906 the user complains that the inotify support in nscd
is not sufficient when it comes to detecting changes in the
configurationfiles that should be watched for the various databases.
The current nscd implementation uses inotify to watch for changes in
the configuration files, but adds watches only for IN_DELETE_SELF and
IN_MODIFY. These watches are insufficient to cover even the most basic
uses by a system administrator. For example using emacs or vim to edit
a configuration file should trigger a reload but it might not if
the editors use move to atomically update the file. This atomic update
changes the inode and thus removes the notification on the file (as
inotify is based on inodes). Thus the inotify support in nscd for
configuration files is insufficient to account for the average use
cases of system administrators and users.
The inotify support is significantly enhanced and described here:
https://www.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-02/msg00504.html
Tested on x86_64 with and without inotify support.
nscd can clear caches when certain files change. The list of files
was hardcoded so far and worked for nss_files and nss_dns and those
modules which need no monitoring. nss_db, for instance, has its
own set of files to monitor. Now the NSS modules themselves can
request that certain files are monitored.
Joseph Myers
Carlos O'Donell
Allan McRae
Andreas Schwab
Roland McGrath
Paul Eggert
Ulrich Drepper