NFS client updates [LWN.net]

NFS client updates

Posted Jan 11, 2006 2:15 UTC (Wed) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385)
In reply to: NFS client updates by brugolsky
Parent article: Looking forward to 2.6.16

"SUNRPC: Ensure that SIGKILL will always terminate a synchronous RPC call."

I've been waiting for that patch since 0.98 or so. It's been broken so long I started to believe it was part of the spec. ;-)

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NFS client updates

Posted Jan 11, 2006 23:50 UTC (Wed) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link]

What does this mean exactly, is it when a program is accessing an nfs file and the network goes down you can't kill the program?

NFS client updates

Posted Jan 12, 2006 0:53 UTC (Thu) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

That's one of the effects.

The addition of lazy umounts and "umount -l" was a major step forward in
this area (you still couldn't kill the processes, but you could drop the
mount point so that you didn't get any more stuck on the dead NFS mount).
Solving the real problem of course is much better. ;-)

I also did things like mess with firewalls and NAT configuration until I
could convince the localhost to talk to its own NFS server (the tricky
part is doing this remotely with a live net-connected machine without
disrupting all of the server's other clients at the same time). This led
to "Stale NFS file handles" all over the place, but at least the RPC
calls would complete and the machine could get on with killing processes.