During the life-cycle of a user-space filesystem the usual flow is:

  1. User-space application does a filesystem-related syscall
  2. Kernel VFS calls into the FUSE kernel driver
  3. FUSE kernel redirects request to the user-space filesystem
  4. User-space server replies to request
  5. FUSE returns reply to VFS
  6. User-space application gets reply from the kernel

However, there are occasions where the filesystem needs to send notifications to
the kernel that are not in reply to any particular request.  If, for example,
when a READ request of 4096 bytes results in the filesystem having more data
available for the specific inode, it may be useful to provide this extra data to
the kernel cache so that future read operations will be faster.

FUSE provides mechanisms for a user-space server to send the kernel certain
types of asynchronous notifications.  Currently, these are the available
notifications:

|-------------+----------------------------------|
| Operation   | libfuse function                 |
|-------------+----------------------------------|
| POLL        | fuse_lowlevel_notify_poll        |
| INVAL_INODE | fuse_lowlevel_notify_inval_inode |
| ENTRY       | fuse_lowlevel_notify_inval_entry |
| STORE       | fuse_lowlevel_notify_store       |
| RETRIEVE    | fuse_lowlevel_notify_retrieve    |
| DELETE      | fuse_lowlevel_notify_delete      |
| RESEND      | -                                |
|-------------+----------------------------------|

One important restriction is that these asynchronous operations SHALL NOT be
performed while executing other FUSE requests.  Doing so will likely result in
deadlocking the user-space filesystem server.  In the example above, if the
server is replying to a READ request and has extra data to add to the kernel
cache, it needs to reply to the READ request first, and, e.g., signal a
different thread to do the STORE.