Re: [PATCH] Fixing soft NFS umount -f, round 1

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Jul 04, 2015 at 08:43:25AM +0200, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:
 > > Well, sure, but we were talking about soft mounts. While I suppose it
 > > would be nice to be able to umount -f a hard mount too, it doesn't
 > > seem like a requirement or even necessarily consistent with the intent
 > > of hard mount semantics.
 > 
 > The intent of hard mount is to make sure any I/O completes, at the
 > expense of waiting a long time if the server is down. But I think it is
 > wrong to extend that up to prevent root from forcibly unmounting a
 > filesystem. 

You can just as easily argue that it's wrong to extend that up to
prevent root from forcibly killing a process stuck on a dead
filesystem. Which it is; and then you have intr mounts.

If you ask me, hard uninterruptible mounts might have been necessary
when Sun first rolled out NFS, but that was almost 30 years ago now
and they should be treated as a historical curiosity, not a feature.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost