inotify does not work on Mac OS X with Ubuntu hosts

[Camicia]

In the latest years there have been a lot of projects that have become popular among the develop community that leverage VirtualBox as development system. Vagrant and docker-machine are just some notable examples.

It is very common that people use a shared folder to share their source code on Mac OS X with the virtual machine and use the virtual machine to run a production-like environment .

There are a few tools that listen for changes on the file system to immediately run rebuilding scripts or restart a server (ex: nodemon, pm2 or gulp in node.js) that rely on inotify.

But inotify is not implemented on shared folders. Work arounds have led to active polling all files in the project and all its subfolders that increase CPU consumption to unacceptable level.

Implementing inotify on shared folders on Mac OS X for ext3 and ext4 guests will fix most of the problems.

One example of bug: ​https://github.com/remy/nodemon/issues/419

[Valery Ushakov]

Duplicate of #10660 (which was closed as wontfix, sorry).