Re: [PATCH] NFS/INOTIFY: inotify user when deleting files on nfs

[Maxim Uvarov <maxim.uvarov@oracle.com>]

On 12/15/2011 01:52 PM, Myklebust, Trond wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Al Viro [mailto:viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk]
>> Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011 4:33 PM
>> To: Maxim Uvarov
>> Cc: linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org; bfields@fieldses.org; Myklebust, Trond;
>> john@johnmccutchan.com; rlove@rlove.org; eparis@parisplace.org
>> Subject: Re: [PATCH] NFS/INOTIFY: inotify user when deleting files on
> nfs
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 11:12:30AM -0800, Maxim Uvarov wrote:
>>
>>> 1. Original VFS code already has "if NFS", in vfs_unlink(). Because
> of
>>> code does not call d_delete() it has to call notification from
>>> d_delete().
>>>
>>> 2. inotify is done on VFS layer. So logically it has to work on all
>>> file systems.
>>
>> You are using a very odd meaning of the word "logically", then.  Note
> that
>> inotify does *not* work on NFS, no matter what vfs_unlink() would do.
>> Simply because files are removed on server, not in VFS.  And server
> does not
>> notify clients of such removals.  Ergo, any software that relies on
> inotify
>> delivering notifications of files being removed is broken on NFS.
>> That has nothing whatsoever to the layer in kernel where it's handled;
> the
>> information asked for is simply not available to client.  Period.
>>
>> Incidentally, inotify does not work on a bunch of local filesystems,
> starting
>> with procfs.  And won't work, unless you are seriously proposing to
> generate
>> events on things like open()/dup2()/etc.  In this case we might very
> well have
>> objects appearing and disappearing without ever having had a dentry.
>
> The other thing to note is that even if there were value in having only
> client support for the locally performed operations, the way NFS deletes
> work is fundamentally different to the way that POSIX unlink works: if
> the file is still open, it isn't deleted, it is just renamed. In
> consequence, it not only still appears in readdir() requests (albeit
> under a different name), but it acts in all ways shapes and forms as the
> same regular file but with the curious property that when the last user
> closes it gets deleted.
>
> IOW: the assumption that we would need to generate an
> fsnotify_nameremove event here is in any case flawed. It would rather be
> fsnotify_move, which I suspect would still trip up these LTP tests...
>
> Cheers
>     Trond
>

Thanks. My original idea was to generate absolutely the same event under 
unlink(). Yes, original file in that case is not deleted, it is moved. 
But from user side it's deletion. Users don't take care about
/tmp/.nfs..  files, right? When you call unlink the only thing you do
is to check return code, you are not walking along all folders to check
where it could be moved.

I also agree that if server or other mounts does something with file, 
server will not send any notification. But for single mount it has to be ok.

Maxim.