The ext4 change 'breaks' Samba too

Posted Mar 28, 2013 13:34 UTC (Thu) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

Once handed out to an NFS client, you don't know when the client may use a cookie; could be much later, could be after we've rebooted. So that internal mapping would have to be kept forever, on disk (to survive reboots).

You could do it, but I think you'd quickly start feeling like you were doing a ton of work that the filesystem should really be doing for you.

SMB might make this easier, I don't know.

It might be possible to extend the NFS protocol to use some kind of directory-read pointer with a more limited lifetime. But that won't solve anybody's problem today, at least not until we get the IETF a time machine. (Four days left for someone to publish an RFC addressing the paradoxes inherent to time-travelling standards processes.)