Re: dentries and NFS filehandles

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Tue, 26 Aug 1997 23:29:56 +0100 (BST)

> I think a much safer scheme would be for nfsd to issue a unique,
> non-repeating id code for each dentry, and to save the dentries (with
> the use count held) in a hash table for some amount of time. Each time

A conventional BSD nfs daemon uses the inode of the file and some versioning
information for the NFS file handle state. The inode is a good thing to
keep handy. It means if people open a file and work with it then a rename
from another client has unix semantics. A path hash doesnt have this property
and is very slow to resolve