[PVFS-developers] Hardlink issues

[Porter Don]

More 1.6.3pre1 things to consider:

Unlinking a hard link seems to be removing the data file from the iods.
This should be fairly easy to fix by checking the reference count on the
meta file.  I have a patch attached that seems to fix this case.

Unfortunately, that isn't the only issue.  The pvfs_meta structure doesn't
store nlink and doesn't send it on a stat request.  This is ok without hard
links, but the kernel module decrements nlink on the remaining file from 1
to 0 and then wrapping back to 65535, etc.  

I suppose this is livable, but pretty wonky and may adversely affect other
things that expect that to be there.  

It is my thought that to fix this we would either need to add a field to the
pvfs_stat structure or to the stat request structure.  

My recommendation would be to add this to pvfs_stat, since that is really
the place for it, but ignore the value on disk when reading it and stat the
actual file for that field. 

I would really like some feedback on the right thing to do before I try to
take a crack at fixing  it.

Thanks,
Don

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