Re: open by handle support for NFS V2

["bfields@fieldses.org" <bfields@fieldses.org>]

On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 05:00:59PM +0000, Trond Myklebust wrote:
> The main use case for open by filehandle was (and still should be) the
> promise of being able to do the sort of tricks you normally associate
> with object storage on a standard filesystem.
> 
> Imagine that you are trying to build an application for indexing and
> searching the data on your storage. You basically want to trawl through
> the filesystem on a regular basis and build up a database of key words
> and other metadata to tell you what is in the files. For that kind of
> application, the namespace is a real PITA to deal with, because files
> get renamed, moved and deleted all the time; so if you can store
> something that is independent of the namespace and that will give you
> access to the file contents, then why wouldn't you do so? Normally,
> applications like that use the inode number, but you can't open a file
> by inode number, and you have the same problems with inode number reuse
> that a NFS server has.
> 
> That's the sort of thing I'd think we want to allow through open by
> filehandle, and I see no reason why NFS should be excluded from that
> type of application.

Thanks, that makes sense.

We've had open_by_handle support for most filesystems since 2011, is
there evidence of anyone doing this?

--b.