Has anyone had much success running an NFS server on a BSD machine and
mounting filesystems onto a Linux machine?  There is a well-known problem
with this configuration.  Supposedly the following are among the problems:

   1) the BSD server does not like to read and write small blocks (e.g.,
      1KB) and the Linux NFS client insists on it,

   2) the Linux client enforces synchronous communication (e.g., it
      doesn't return from a write() system call until it has received an
      acknowledgement from the server that data has been written to the
      disk), and

   3) the Linux client is just generally slow.


However,

it seems to me that the story is even a little worse than all of that.  As
an example, if I try to link an executable on the Linux box and store the
result on the NFS-mounted filesystem, it takes about a SECOND PER KILOBYTE
after it finishes compiling to write the damn .o file out to disk.  During
this time, the BSD machine is slammed, and the audio effects from the hard
drive sound like the typewriters in a big news room (back when they used
typewriters).

So here's what I'm hoping.  Someone has either had moderate success with
this configuration by changing some parameter for the server or Linux
client, OR someone at least has an idea what is going on, so I could start
to immagine a solution.

As a hint, the sounds from the BSD machine's hard drive appear to indicate
that it is doing a lot of seeking during the ld stage of compilation.  And
I noticed that ld calls read() and write() successively in very a
unintelligent manner.  For example, it seems to read the same 8K block over
and over, and in between each read, it writes chunks of data with sizes
ranging in the tens of bytes.  I'm almost sure (but not positive) that the
Linux OS should be buffering these small writes.  If anyone has a clue, I'd
be very grateful.

   Thank you,

   - rick


-- 
Richard B. Kilgore
Grad Student, University of Texas at Austin
WWW URL: http://lore.ece.utexas.edu/~rkilgore/
E-mail rkilgore@pine.ece.utexas.edu