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

NeilBrown
2018-12-12T22:45:43Z

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On Thu, Dec 13 2018, Ashish Sangwan wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Our NFS filer can sometimes return same inode number for different directories.

Why?

> 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?

As long as the file handles are different, the Linux client won't really
notice.
Problems might occur with applications which check inode numbers.
I don't know of any that would be confused by directories having the
same inode number, but that doesn't mean there aren't any.

> https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/2/346

This is ancient! It is mostly about the NFS server, not the client.
Filesystems that NFSd is exporting need to be careful to provide unique
file handles.

> 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.

I don't think anything important has changed. The server must return
unquie filehandles. It should return unique inode numbers. User-space
may or may not get confused if it doesn't.

NeilBrown

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