Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 22:44:17 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: dg@root.com Cc: green@zone.syracuse.NET, grog@lemis.com, julian@whistle.com, mike@smith.net.au, bag@sinbin.demos.su, rock@cs.uni-sb.de, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: -current NFS problem Message-ID: <199810152244.PAA22563@usr04.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199810150258.TAA07046@implode.root.com> from "David Greenman" at Oct 14, 98 07:58:41 pm
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> >Well, according to Jordan's "non-verification" to my alluding that since > >Dr. McKusick was committing NFS deltas, he was the mysterious contracted > >NFS fixer-upper. Last time I checked, he didn't really do his entire job > >if that was to totally fix NFS.... but hey, I don't use NFS much if ever, > >so I won't Complain... > > Kirk was contracted to fix the problems that he could fix in a short amount > of time. He did that and confirmed my own analysis of the remaining problems, > which basically all stem from lack of FS node locking in the NFS code. Adding > such locking opens a very large can of worms and everyone who has tried to > do this has failed. Not everyone. Network Appliance, Sun Microsystems, USL, and SCO have all got working NFS. I think BSDI has working NFS as well, including locking based one some of the stub code produced for FreeBSD by Andrew (and by me), and I'm pretty sure the NFS code, sans locking, worked before it left the University of Guelph. The problems with NFS in FreeBSD are architectural problems with FreeBSD. Until someone starts committing fixes for the architectural problems, you're going to continue to see their effects percolate up to the surface in various places (like the recent complaints by someone trying to do advisory locking on sockets; an fd is an fd, right? Wrong). To put it another way, if the foundation is out of square, then any house you build on the foundation will also be out of square. I would like to recommend contacting John Heidemann about the differences between his stacking vnode VFS architecture and the implementation of that architecture in FreeBSD. At least it would be a starting point for addressing some of these things, with an appeal to an authority everyone can respect instead of a disagreement between peers. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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