which ioctls matter across filesystems

From: Steve French
Date: Fri Apr 29 2005 - 14:25:34 EST


Other than the obvious example of
EXT2_IOC_GETFLAGS
and
EXT2_IOC_SETFLAGS
which are implemented by multiple filesystems (and are necessary to support a few commonly used tools), are there any other ioctls which should be able to be sent remotely (optionally)? For it to be worth extending the network protocol (in my case CIFS to servers such as Samba, but presumably cluster filesystems have similar interests in supporting all key local tools across the network), an ioctl would have to be
- used by more than one local filesystem
- not have an equivalent way to do the same thing without an ioctl

I have added the GET/SETFLAGS client support, but am not aware of any others which would need to be remoted. For fcntl there are more, but it requires more research to figure out how to handle setlease/getlease and a few others with network implications without degrading performance. Although I am not a fan of ioctls and fcntls, there are a few that are necessary to achieve 100% local semantics across the network.

The new inotify mechanism being prototyped in -mm currently is the other one which needs work to determine how to map it across the network. Since it was added for support of Samba, the corresponding client part (for cifs) may turn out to map to the network protocol quite well already, and given NFSv4 having various similarities to CIFS, it would be interesting if the semantics of inotify would map to NFSv4 write protocol.
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