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Date:      Thu, 15 Oct 1998 17:56:57 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Kevin Day <toasty@home.dragondata.com>
To:        tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert)
Cc:        dg@root.com, 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:  <199810152256.RAA20521@home.dragondata.com>
In-Reply-To: <199810152244.PAA22563@usr04.primenet.com> from Terry Lambert at "Oct 15, 98 10:44:17 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.
> 

I don't think it's just architectural problems that people are complaining
over though.

I'd be perfectly happy to go back to 3.0 if nfs didn't cause kernel panic's.
I can deal with the limitations that freebsd's implementation has, as long
as one of those limitations isn't "Don't expect a >24 hour uptime, if
you're making heavy use of NFS."

2.2 is stablish when it comes to NFS. I get randomly corrupted files, but
it's so rare, i don't worry much about it. 3.0 causes kernel panics up the
wazoo. (nfsbioread, Bad nfs svc reply, nfs rcvunlock, bwrite: buffer is not
busy???, etc..... page fault while in kernel mode comes up often, too)


That's my only present beef when it comes to NFS.


Kevin



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