NFS locking problems with 7.0-RELEASE

[Bryan Alves]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 2:16 PM, Rick Macklem <rmacklem at uoguelph.ca> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, 30 Dec 2008, Bryan Alves wrote:
>
>  - Download my server patches (ftp.cis.uoguelph.ca/pub/nfsv4/FreeBSD7) and
>>>  switch to using nfsv4, which has integral locking in the protocol.
>>>
>>> Have a good holiday, rick
>>>
>>>
>>>  Is there another location where I can get the nfs4 patches?  That FTP
>> seems
>> to be down.
>>
>>  Seems to be working here. Just "ftp ftp.cis.uoguelph.ca", login
> "anonymous", then "cd pub/nfsv4/FreeBSD7". (Is it that you can't find
> the machine? It's IP# is 131.104.48.112.)
>
>  Also, outside the scope of this list, but since the discussion is opened,
>> I
>> might as well ask:
>>
>> If this NFS is the only remote mount that involves writing (it's opened
>> read-only in other locations), and it's read/write locally, is it safe to
>> use local locking?
>>
>>  Yes, I believe so. Even if there are multiple clients rw mounting a file
> system, local locking should be fine unless there are multiple clients
> writing the same file in the file system. (With a single writer and
> multiple readers, an application might run into coherency problems if
> that application was written to use byte range locking to maintain
> coherency (ie. most recently written data visible to the readers), but
> that seems unlikely to matter for most applications/environments. (And
> I'm not sure if the NLM is wired into NFS is such a way as to maintain
> full coherency for the locked byte ranges anyhow, since normally NFS
> does not maintain full coherency?)
>
> Have a happy new years, rick
>
>
Well, I've upgraded to 7.1-RC2, in hopes that the kernel NFSLOCKD would make
things better.  Instead it made things worse.  Now when locking fails, the
system completely freezes, forcing a hard reset.  There doesn't seem to be a
way to turn off the kernel option anymore either (if you don't compile it in
it's loaded on demand, and if it's not available because you move it, the
kernel dies).

I had some success turning off PF completely in getting NFS working, but
even that has stopped now.

I no longer have any idea what the problem is, nor do I have any other
directions to diagnose it.  Having the system completely lock up now makes
most debugging efforts take extra long and makes them be a waste of time.

I'm just going back to samba.  I'll give up 20+ MB/s of throughput to have a
working network-mounted home directory.