NFS safety in 6.1-RELEASE

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 05:25:27PM +0400, Dmitry Marakasov wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> In the TODO list for 6.1 RELEASE there was (and still is -
> http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.1R/todo.html) one entry that
> bugs me:
> 
>       Issue: NFS data corruption between two 7.0 machines
>      Status: In progress
> Responsible: Mohan Srinivasan
> Description: Running fsx between a 7.0 NFS client and server detects
> data corruption. This problem can also be reproduced by using 6.1
> NFS server. The problem seems to be avoidable by turning off the
> attribute cache on the NFS client.
> 
> So I wanted to ask what's status of NFS for release - was that issue
> fixed and is it safe to use client and server NFS on 6.1 RELEASE?
> If there's still data corruption possible, how do I turn off the
> attribute cache?

It's worth pointing out that the known problems either only manifest

a) when running against specific servers (e.g. certain old Linux
kernels, which probably means "server bug")

b) under extremely high loads (my test suite uses 1000 concurrent
filesystem I/O generators)

Apart from the issues Scott mentioned, there is also a problem with
writes via mmap() not being committed correctly, so subsequent reads
do not see the correct data.  This is not yet understood since it only
occurs under condition b), so it's very hard to diagnose.

For most users, these issues are unlikely to ever be encountered.

Kris
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