kern/57696: NFS client readdir terminates prematurely if renaming files

[Brian Candler]

The following reply was made to PR kern/57696; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>
To: Chris Shenton <chris at shenton.org>
Cc: freebsd-gnats-submit at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: kern/57696: NFS client readdir terminates prematurely if renaming files
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 17:29:42 +0100

 On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 08:33:25PM -0400, Chris Shenton wrote:
 > At work I tested a FreeBSD-4.9-PRERELEASE client against our netapp
 > and found the same failure with the "nfstest" program Brian posted. A
 > Solaris-2.9 client did not exhibit this problem.
 
 Apparently a "bad cookie" message is logged for each failure event, and the
 following related thread has been pointed out to me:
 http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-August/008402.html
 
 The implication of what is written there is that readdir() is entitled to
 fail if the directory has been changed underneath it.
 
 I don't know how Linux and Solaris cope with this: do they take an in-memory
 snapshot of the whole directory at the client side, which readdir() then
 traverses? Or do they just blindly continue to traverse a directory which
 they know has changed?
 
 Regards,
 
 Brian.