FYI it doesnt work! But I been supplied a patch by the LINUX supercomputer
people which DOES supply the required semantic. Thanks for yr help!

Mark


On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, Neil Brown wrote:

> On Tuesday November 30, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 30, 1999 at 04:55:52PM +0000, Mark O'Neill elucidated:
> > > One of the nicest aspects of this system is a shared heap model which
> > > permits processes to use mmap() (as opposed to sbrk() to create and share
> > > data heaps. The problem is while this works very nicely if the
> > > co-operating processes are on the same machine, it fails under NFS because
> > > user processes on a client machine cannot tell the NFS kernel daemon on
> > > that machine to flush all cached data back to the physical file on the
> > > NFS server. How hard would it be to implement an additional system call
> > > [say nfssync()] to perform this function? Typically this would not impinge
> > > on NFS filesystem performance, as this (slow) operation would only need to
> > > be called when a process has finished modifying a shared heap in order to
> > > provide up-to-date data for other clients of that heap.
> > > 
> 
> Well... it should work.  An 'fsync' on the client tells the client
> kernel NFS implementation to send any cached write requests to the
> server, and when the server receives the write request, it is required
> by the protocol to store it to "stable storage" before repling to the
> request.  So after an fsync (or close) on the client, all the data
> should be safe on disc on the server.
> 
> However, the linux kernel nfsd has an option (which is unfortunately
> the default) to allow it to return before the data is safe.  This
> makes NFS server faster (20%?) but less safe.
> If you export with the "sync" export option, it should write data
> safely do disc before returning.
> 
> Does this address your problem? or did I miss something.
> 
> > 
> > I wonder if it would be better to use CODA, or similar shared FS, as 
> > opposed to NFS in this situation.  
> 
> I don't think CODA would be an answer.  From my understanding, it
> doesn't allow shared write access to a file (the file gets copied,
> whole, to which ever client has it open).
> 
> NeilBrown
> 

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to