On Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:13:22 -0400 Devon Miller <devon.c.miller@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Re: Approach 1 > Is there a way for process B to use file locking (or some other > mechanism) such that it could be guaranteed a consistent view of F? It shouldn't need to. With either approach, the encryption translator (actually a partner translator on the server side) is responsible for providing any serialization necessary to prevent clients from seeing intermediate states in the middle of a write. With approach 1, this includes the state where the file has been extended but the pad bytes have not yet been moved into an xattr. With approach 2, this includes the state where an extending write has been issued but its result is not yet known - so that it would be invalid to issue the setxattr to persist the true EOF. Much of this is covered in http://cloudfs.org/dist/design.md That's the document which had previously been posted on cloudfs-devel, and to which Edward was responding. I apologize for his attempt to continue the discussion on another list without providing appropriate context.