By default, autotest implements filesystem polling to detect these changes. This can use a significant amount of CPU cycles¹, and can impact battery life in laptops.

Through Linux’s inotify, autotest-inotify inserts callbacks into the underlying filesystem, which allows the filesystem to notify us when files we’re interested in have been modified. This allows autotest to sleep until inotify indicates a change has been made to one our files of interest, i.e. we don’t have to constantly poll the filesystem.

This work was inspired by Sven Schwyn’s work on autotest-fsevent, which extends autotest to use Mac OS X’s FSEvents system, as well as Alban Peignier’s work using the INotify gem. Where autotest-inotify differs from Schwyn’s work, is that autotest-inotify can be used in Linux, whereas autotest-fsevent uses FSEvent, which is Mac OS X specific. Autotest-inotify differs from Peignier’s work in that it offers a simpler gem-based installation, and it is less obtrusive to autotest’s methods for determining which files to watch for changes.

Source code for the autotest-inotify gem can be found at http://github.com/ewollesen/autotest-inotify. It is licensed under the MIT license. See the README for installation instructions.

1. On one of my machines, ~25% of a single core’s cycles were spent polling the filesystem