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Andrew Morton authored
From: Chuck Lever <cel@citi.umich.edu> O_DIRECT|O_APPEND cannot possibly work on NFS, so NFS needs some way of preventing the user from setting this combination. We felt that the best way of implementing this restriction is to allow the filesytem to implement its own fcntl() handler. This patch does, that, and provide the appropriate handler for NFS. Additional details from Chuck: Forgetting O_DIRECT for a moment, O_APPEND writes on NFS don't work in any case when multiple clients are writing to a file, since an NFS client can never guarantee it knows where the true end of file is 100% of the time. it works as expected iff only one client writes to an O_APPEND file at a time. Multi-client O_APPEND writing doesn't seem to be a problem for any application I'm aware of. Since it can be made to behave in the multi-client case with careful application logic or by using file locking, I don't think we should disallow it. I want to drop the inode semaphore when doing NFS direct I/O because it is synchronous; holding the i_sem means we reduce direct I/O concurrency to one I/O per file at a time. the important thing sct was worried about was the case where a single client is writing with O_APPEND and O_DIRECT, and we don't hold the i_sem during the write. We must at least hold the i_sem when determining where the end of file is to do the O_APPEND write. In 2.6, I believe that is handled correctly in the VFS layer, so this is not an issue for 2.6, right?
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