On Fri, 12 Mar 1999 21:44:15 -0800 (PST) 
 Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@nas.nasa.gov> wrote:

 > How badly would this break an nfs server? The first nfsd to read the file
 > would sleep for five minutes. What would happen then? Would the client
 > retry, and possibly send another process to sleep (possibly getting all of
 > them)?

Well...

nfsd(8) itself doesn't actually do any reads/writes.  What it does is
set up the socket/authentication, and then run entirely inside the kernel.
All reads/writes are done in the kernel.

        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>