Gnome and Firefox, lockd and NFS
Daniel Feenberg
feenberg at nber.org
Thu Sep 13 19:51:50 UTC 2018
We are using the NFS server on FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE-p7 to serve home
directories to Linux SL7 (same as Centos7 and RH7) clients via NFSv3.
While this worked fine with SL6, we find that starting Firefox, Gnome or
Mate causes the client to hang with the message:
nfs server XXX not responding, still trying
and (for example)
~/.mozilla/firefox/XXX/.nfs00000000000XXXXXXXXX file stuck
If one tries to remove the lock, the client responds:
Cannot remove, Device or resource busy
Furthermore, the server quickly stops serving *all* other clients also. If
we kill the client process, then the server recovers after a few minutes.
Our workaround has been to move the directories .local, .config and .dbus
in the home directory to an NFS partition that is mounting without
locking, but this seems inadequate as a permanent solution.
Since the FreeBSD server stops responding to other clients, it seems it
must be a FreeBSD problem. Even if the Linux client (systemd?) is making
an improper request, it is inappropriate for FreeBSD to hang in response.
We also see this same result with Truenas and FreeNAS fileservers (which
are based on FreeBSD) but see https://redmine.ixsystems.com/issues/927 for
another report related to earlier clients. A Linux NFS server does not
display this problem.
Daniel Feenberg
National Bureau of Economic Research
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