[Pvfs2-users] VFS clients on a single machine appear to work with flock

[Rob Ross]

we haven't spent any time making flock() work, so if it works on one 
machine, consider yourself lucky :).

why do you need locks?

rob

Lorenzo Pinto wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I realize that flock and other flavors of advisory locking are not 
> officially supported by PVFS through VFS. However, with my setup of one 
> PVFS client machine, four I/O servers, and one metadata server 
> (different from the client machine), it does appear that multiple 
> applications and/or threads, on the one client machine, calling flock on 
> a pvfs2 file-system file behave correctly.  This can be tested using the 
> (FC5) flock application. As expected, this does not work with multiple 
> client machines.
> 
> For my particular task, I could accept all PVFS applications that write 
> data to be confined to one machine while the readers (which would not 
> use locking) are distributed among numbers machines.
> 
> Now the question:  Is the behavior I'm observing by design, or is it 
> some coincidence that should not be relied upon.
> 
> System info:
>    pvfs2-1.5.0
>    VFS interface
>    Fedora Core 5,  2.6.16-1.2122_FC5smp
> 
> Regards,
> Lorenzo