NFS on version 2.1.60

Richard B. Johnson (root@chaos.analogic.com)
Sat, 1 Nov 1997 11:07:42 -0500 (EST)

It appears that if I mount a remote file system and then `tar` a directory
tree to it, all is fine unless the remote file-system becomes full.
Once the remote file-system becomes fill, the local 'tar' goes into
uninterruptable sleep and nfsiod becomes continuously busy using about
10% of available CPU time. The remote file-system can't be dismounted.

Further, if I shut down the remote machine (a Sun), the local nsfiod
goes back to sleep but the `tar` process is still hung in uninterruptable
sleep. Once the remote system has been shut down, I can still read
the mounted file-system's directory on the local machine. If I attempt
to write to it (by deleting some files), the shell process hangs forever
just like the `tar` process.

This is 100% repeatable on this system.

It looks like a remote file-access failure is not being propagated to
the user-level code under these conditions.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Richard B. Johnson
Project Engineer
Analogic Corporation
Penguin : Linux version 2.1.60 on an i586 machine (66.15 BogoMips).
Warning : It's hard to remain at the trailing edge of technology.