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Date: Sat, 11 Oct 1997 23:57:36 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199710111357.XAA24301@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: bde@zeta.org.au, helbig@Informatik.BA-Stuttgart.DE
Subject: Re: make world failed
Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG
Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

>>   failure occurs early, for rm -f, because nfs returns ESTALE instead
>>   of ENOENT for (necessarily) failing lookups in the removed directory,
>>   and rm -f doesn't understand ESTALE.
>
>Should it?

I think the problem is really in nfs.  Removed directories should not
be found by namei().  nfs presumably caches the directory name and
finds the old inode and gets ESTALE when it attempts to access the
inode.  It should purge the cache and retry (not too many times).
It does purge the cache in nfs_request() but it doesn't seem to retry
there.

Bruce