Major NFS Bugs Found & Being Fixed

mbadolato writes "From an article at kerneltrap.org: On the FreeBSD hacker mailing list, Jordan Hubbard commented on some serious issues with NFS, posting a tool called 'fsx' - originally developed for the NeXT OS - that was ideal for finding them. Matt Dillon was quite impressed by the tool and immediately started playing with it. In very little time, he presented a number of major fixes..."

There's a good collection of the emails here describing some of the fixes that Matt Dillon has made."

Comments

Not only NFS

[flynn_nrg]

Apparently Matt found one bug in the softupdates code and reported it to McKusick, who has written a patch. Matt is still testing the new code in -current and if everythings works ok it will be MFC'ed to -stable within one week, so that this code makes it for 4.5-RELEASE that is coming soon.

Re:fsx.c (on GNU/Linux)

[Carl]

It was already discussed on the kernel mailing list.
Including a (trivial) port to GNU/Linux.
Local filesystems are OK (except for ReiserFS), but NFS does show some problems.
http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel /0112.1/1573.html

It also shows problems in Linux....

[pwagland]

This is the linux-kernel thread.

In essence, the problem is seen on reiserfs (being investigated) and also in NFS. No-one has mentioned following up on the NFS problems yet...

Nor have problems yet been seen in XFS, Ext2 or Ext3.

Re:Major NFS bugs found, but hidden from main page

[Coz]

Would you rather be oblivious? As it stands, *BSD fans see this note, and a lot of work is going into developing a fix, not only for BSD, but for Linux as well - if you want to follow the status, follow the links/mirrors/forums. The tool these guys are using (publicly available) has discovered major flaws in the internal VM implementation - what are the odds you'd EVER hear of that with M$? (BTW, has anyone run this against M$'s NFS implementations?)

Besides, part of the fun of open-source is watching the evolution. The emails documenting how this evolved are fun to read - wonder what M$'s equivalents say? We'll never know....