Comment 7 for bug 956827

tail works perfectly without inotify but like a large number of software will use inotify if present.

The bug we're tracking in bug 882147 is the fact that overlayfs advertises inotify support and allows software to call the inotify API but without actually sending the events.

So the userspace side is doing the right thing as there's no way for it to know that inotify isn't working (what it's receiving is identical to a file that's simply not changing), the problem lands on the kernel side and that's what we're focusing on now.