linux-kernel - Re: If not readdir() then what?

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Message-ID: <20070409110927.GA23240@lazybastard.org>
Date:	Mon, 9 Apr 2007 13:09:27 +0200
From:	Jörn Engel <joern@...ybastard.org>
To:	Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>, "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	Ulrich Drepper <drepper@...il.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Neil Brown <neilb@...e.de>
Subject: Re: If not readdir() then what?

On Sun, 8 April 2007 21:44:26 -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> 
> Well, Joern thought that rm -rf might relying on the telldir cookie
> being valid in precisely that circumstance.  If that is true, I'd
> argue that this is a BUG in GNU coreutils that should be fixed...

I heard it and accepted that claim without checking it.  Might have been
a mistake.  But the claim came from an NFS developer, which may explain
a thing or two.

NFS clients have to deal with a server rebooting underneith them and
should still behave as expected.  An "rm -r" running on the client
concurrently to a rebooting server is a problem indeed and could be
solved with seekdir/telldir.

That surely doesn't make life any easier for filesystem developers, I
agree.  From that point of view, all telldir cookies should end their
life at closedir time.  For "rm -r" it would be sufficient if the nfs
client simply didn't seekdir at all.  For "ls -lR", this would return
duplicate dentries.

Jörn

-- 
My second remark is that our intellectual powers are rather geared to
master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes
evolving in time are relatively poorly developed.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
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