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    SubjectRe: A desktop environment[1] kernel wishlist
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    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    the system either slows to a crawl (inotify) or the database gets out of
    date quickly (fanotify+LSM).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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