5 Jul
2020
5 Jul
'20
6:40 p.m.
On 7/5/2020 10:43 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
So I've encountered lots of holes in NFS files
where there shouldn't be
any. So it is/was a thing. But that said, I can't remember a single
case of encountering that on Sun's campus. I don't know if my memory
is failing me, but I do know that when I left Sun and started working
with other NFS implementations, yeah, lots of problems. Somehow Sun
got it right where other people didn't.
I can say personally, since the early 90's on SunOS, I never ever saw
this problem in a variety of environments. One being Nynex Science and
Technology where I did a consulting stint. 800+ node Sun 3/4 SunOS
workstation/server environment, basically everyone's desktop was a Sun
workstation for email, documentation, whatever. Another being a defense
contractor I was at for 7 years, they were all Sun for engineering
workstations and servers.
There is one possibility I just thought of, and that's if the first
write fails and then a context switch happens, if enough free space is
made available before the next context switch back to the second write,
I can see that being a problem ;)
As if you weren't already tired of my rambling... When it comes to
non-Sun operating systems, all bets were off. They all (mostly) worked
with their own kind. That usually wasn't the case when it came to
cross-vendor support. Sun<->HP was not great, but that also may have
been driver problems in the one instance I tried it for an extended
period of time. Two instances at different customers of AIX<->Sun
actually worked rather well. The YP integration was key.
The entire problem with "holey" files and NFS is certainly related to
the usage type of the system in question. What was Sun doing? Email?
Software development? Using a common NFS share for the compiler? And
then copying their code up to a central location? Not a lot of
sync/write/sync/write activity, unless object file generation is a lot
of skipping around all over the place. ;)
art k.