So what do you suggest we do here? IMO at a minimum NFS should retry
once similar
to nfs4_file_open (it would probably address 99.9% of the use-cases
where symlinks are
not overwritten in a high enough frequency for the client to see 2
consecutive stale readlink
rpc rplies).
I can send a patch paired with a vfs ESTALE conversion patch?
alternatively retry locally in NFS...
I would like to understand your position here.
Looking more closely at nfs_get_link(), it is obvious that it can
already return ESTALE (thanks to the call to nfs_revalidate_mapping())
and looking at do_readlinkat(), it has already been plumbed through
with a call to retry_estale().
So I think we can take your patch as is, since it doesn't add any error
cases that callers of readlink() don't have to handle already.
Sounds good.
We might still want to think about cleaning up the output of the VFS in
all these cases, so that we don't return ESTALE when it isn't allowed
by POSIX, but that would be a separate task.
Yes, I can follow up on that later...
