Subject: Re: [PATCH v7 08/10] fsmonitor: add tests for Linux

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2026 08:43:12 +0100

On Thu, Feb 26, 2026 at 12:27:21AM +0000, Paul Tarjan via GitGitGadget wrote:
> From: Paul Tarjan <[email-masked]>
> 
> Add a smoke test that verifies the filesystem actually delivers
> inotify events to the daemon.  On some configurations (e.g.,
> overlayfs with older kernels), inotify watches succeed but events
> are never delivered.  The daemon cookie wait will time out, but
> every subsequent test would fail.  Skip the entire test file early
> when this is detected.

Hm. So the fsmonitor listener for Linux is not reliable? Wouldn't the
end user see the same issue then? I'm not sure whether just ignoring
that issue and adding a timeout to our tests is the proper way to fix
it.

Before we jump to such solutions I'd rather want to know what the root
cause of this. We had similar issues in the past on macOS, where we
eventually figured out that we were missing events due to the buffers
not being big enough. So did you investigate what the conditions are to
trigger this?

Patrick