Proposal for a new I/O library design

[Ben Rudiak-Gould]

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Alastair Reid wrote:

> Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
> > If it's not possible to provide a guarantee of File identity then we
> > should probably drop the whole idea of File values. 
> 
> I haven't been following in enough detail to know if File values are a good 
> idea or not but it's maybe worth mentioning that if you're NFS, there's no 
> way to test file identity.  IIRC, the problem is that a machine might 
> nfs-export overlapping parts of its filesystem so you might have two names 
> for the same file.

I don't think this is fatal. The important part of File identity is that
two File values which compare equal necessarily denote the same file, not
the converse. I don't think there's any observable difference between File
values which denote different files and File values which denote the same
file but don't compare equal, since there could be a demon (not daemon --
I'm thinking Maxwell's demon here) watching everything you do to file x/y
and immediately doing the same thing to file y/x.

Now, if NFS doesn't even guarantee the forward implication (for e.g.
filehandle comparison by value), then that's bad. But not bad for us. Bad
for anyone foolish enough to use NFS.

> ps (At least in FreeBSD) mmapping an NFS-mounted file can also lead to 
> unhappiness.  If you mmap the same NFS-mounted file multiple times, you can 
> end up with multiple copies of the same page which leads to chaos when you 
> start writing to the pages.

That's bad too. See previous paragraph. :-)


-- Ben