Handling of duplicate inode numbers for the directories in the nfs v3 kernel client

Ashish Sangwan
2018-12-12T18:57:26Z

Hi,

Our NFS filer can sometimes return same inode number for different directories.
For example /mnt/dir1/dir2 and /mnt/dir3/dir4, in same rare cases dir2
and dir4 might end up returning the same inode number to the client.
Though it can never happen that inode numbers will be same for two
directories and also there parent is same. Can linux client handle
this case? What issues it can cause?
https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/2/346
I stumbled upon this thread where it is written that nfs client can
handle this but userspace will see inode collisions. Given that this
will happen only for directories, userspace utils logic might not get
affected from this as hardlinks on directories are not possible. But
the thread is really old. Wanted to confirm if this holds true even
now.

Thanks,
Ashish