On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 07:12:36AM -0500, Jeff Layton wrote: > On Wed, 2026-01-21 at 22:37 -0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 21, 2026 at 10:18:00AM -0500, Jeff Layton wrote: > > > > fat seems to be an exception as far as the 'real' file systems go. > > > > And it did sound to me like some of the synthetic ones had similar > > > > issues. > > > > > > > > > > Not sure what we can do about FAT without changing the filehandle > > > format in some fashion. The export ops just use > > > generic_encode_ino32_fh, and FAT doesn't have stable inode numbers. > > > The "nostale" ops seem sane enough but it looks like they only work > > > with the fs in r/o mode. > > > > Yeah. I guess we need to ignore this because of <history> > > > > Yep. This is a case where the handles are not PERSISTENT but I don't > think we can get away with making FAT unexportable. We're probably > stuck with it. > > > > > I think Amirs patch would take care of that. Although userland nfs > > > > servers or other storage applications using the handle syscalls would > > > > still see them. Then again fixing the problem that some handles > > > > did not fulfill the long standing (but not documented well enough) > > > > semantics probably is a good fix on it's own. > > > > > > Agreed. We should try to ensure uniqueness and persistence in all > > > filehandles both for nfsd and userland applications. > > > > Sounds good to me. > > > Unfortunately, there are already exceptions. Apparently pidfs and > cgroupfs handles (at least) can't be extended because of userspace > expectations: > > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/20260120-irrelevant-zeilen-b3c40a8e6c30@brauner/
systemd cracking file handles?? Yeesh, I thought userspace was supposed to treat a file handle as an opaque N-byte blob and nothing more, and only certain "special" tools (e.g. xfsprogs on XFS) could do more than that. --D > My personal take is that we should try to make handle uniqueness a goal > for most existing filesystems, but we're going to have some that can't > achieve that. For them we probably want to be able to flag them so they > can be id'ed by userland. > > So, we will need an export_operations flag of some sort > (EXPORT_OP_UNIQUE_HANDLES?). At that point, we'll have to decide > whether to deny nfsd export based on that flag: > > We could deny export of any fs that doesn't set the flag, but NFSv4 > actually allows the server to advertise that it can't guarantee handle > uniqueness. There isn't much guidance for the client on how to handle > that though and the attribute seems to have the scope of the entire NFS > server. > > -- > Jeff Layton <[email protected]> >
