[NFS-Ganesha-Devel] Re: Better interop for NFS/SMB file share mode/reservation

[Frank Filz]

> On Wed, Mar 06, 2019 at 09:09:21AM +0200, Amir Goldstein wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 11:48 PM J. Bruce Fields <bfields at fieldses.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 04:06:52PM -0500, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> > > > After this:
> > > >
> > > >       https://marc.info/?l=linux-nfs&m=154966239918297&w=2
> > > >
> > > > delegations would no longer conflict with opens from the same
> > > > tgid.  So if your threads all run in the same process and you're
> > > > willing to manage conflicts among your own clients, that should
> > > > still allow you to do multiple opens of the same file without giving up your
> lease/delegation.
> > > >
> > > > I'd be curious to know whether that works with Samba's design.
> > >
> > > Any idea whether that would work?
> > >
> > > (Easy?  Impossible?  Possible, but realistically the changes
> > > required to Samba would be painful enough that it'd be unlikely to
> > > get done?)
> > >
> >
> > [CC Ralph Boehme]
> >
> > I am not a samba team member, but seems to me that your proposal fits
> > samba design like a glove. With one smbd process per client
> > connection, with your proposal, opens (for read) from same smbd
> > process will not break the shared read lease from same client, so
> > oplocks level II could be implemented using kernel oplocks (new flavor).
> 
> OK.  So I wonder about Ganesha.  I'm not sure, but I *think* it's like knfsd in that
> it has a bunch of worker threads that can each take rpc's from any client.  I don't
> remember if they're actually threads or processes.

Ganesha does use worker threads, however, one thing that may be an advantage here, or at least can be leveraged, is that Ganesha attaches a single file descriptor to each stateid. As long as the I/O requests come using the stateid, that file descriptor will be used.

We have some work completed and more in progress on delegations, and if there becomes a new kernel oplock available, we could definitely use it. On the other hand, FSAL_VFS which is the FSAL used with kernel file systems does not support delegations...

The (distributed) file systems we support delegations on have use space libraries (which Samba should also be using?) that implement the delegation primitives.

> > IOW, can someone from samba team please elaborate on this quote from
> > samba wiki [1]: "Linux kernel oplocks don't provide the needed features.
> > (They don't even work correctly for oplocks...) ==> SMB-only feature."
> >
> > [1] https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba3/SMB2#new_concepts
> 
> Yes, it'd be useful to get those details written down in one place.
> 
> > I would like to use this opportunity to ask samba team members to
> > raise any (*) other pain points about missing or lacking Linux kernel interfaces.
> > I promise to use my time in LSF/MM 2019 to try and promote samba needs
> > among Linux filesystem developers.
> 
> I feel like this particular problem is about details of oplock/lease/delegation
> semantics that will interest a small number of people, so should mainly be
> handled as a hallway-track thing.  But, maybe it's good to bring it up in a session
> if only to make sure anyone interested is aware.
> 
> > (*) OK, not RichACLs. I know my own limitations.
> 
> Hah.

:-)

Frank