[linux-cifs-client] Re: [Fwd: remoting flock over network]

[Jeremy Allison]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 02:53:45PM -0500, Steve French wrote:
> Comments anyone?
> 
> Seems like a regression that flock used to work over the network (in the
> past flock was simply mapped onto fcntl) but does not since 2.something
> kernel.

Yeah, it really shouldn't. In the man page it notes that flock does
not work over nfs. flock is an old syscall that is somewhat disparaged
now.

> That any type of file locking would be for local apps only on Linux
> seems odd - from even back in the DOS days I always thought of locking
> as having value only/mainly when in a network with apps running on
> multiple clients - if you only wanted to serialize locally - there are
> plenty of other mechanisms that are more efficient.
> 
> But this does create problems for CIFS since we can not distinguish
> among the three types of locks easily.

To add flock we'd have to add a new UNIX specific primitive. As it
already doesn't work over NFS maybe we should just state it doesn't
work over CIFS too :-).

Jeremy.