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From: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
To: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 07:12:19 +1000
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Cc: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>,
       =?ISO-8859-1?Q?J=F6rn?= Engel <joern@lazybastard.org>,
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       Ulrich Drepper <drepper@gmail.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: If not readdir() then what?
In-Reply-To: message from Trond Myklebust on Tuesday April 10
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On Tuesday April 10, trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no wrote:
> The problem is that it is extremely hard to come up with an alternative
> that doesn't impose new conditions on what filesystems you can support.

I seem to remember Hans Reiser making a credible suggestion years ago
when NFSv4 was still in draft.  It didn't fly, but I don't really
remember why.

The NFS server gets to either return a cookie like it currently does,
or sets a flag (or maybe returns a special cookie) which says 'just
use the name'.
A READDIR request contains either a cookie or a filename.  Either mean
"This identifies the last name I got from you, give me the next one".

Is there something that makes that interface problematic?

NeilBrown