Event Streams

Linux inotify Events Are a Lossy Change Stream

An inotify file descriptor exposes filesystem activity as an ordered queue of event records, but that queue is not an authoritative history of namespace state. Identical unread events may be coalesced, queue capacity is bounded, and an overflow explicitly means events have been lost. A process that treats the stream as a complete transaction log can therefore preserve a state that no longer matches the filesystem. The interface is better modeled as change notification with recovery obligations. Events can make a cache current incrementally while the stream remains intact; some conditions invalidate that incremental history and require reconciliation against filesystem state.