When I have an nfs share that is mounted with the hard option (either explicitly or implicitly since hard is on by default), and the nfs server becomes unresponsive for any reason, it often causes the entire OS to hang on many operations. In some cases I cannot even reboot a server depending on what the nfs share was used for. I relaize that this was probably done intentionally to prevent data loss. However, when I am cleaning up a disaster and I actually do want to "umount -f" a stalled nfs share and data loss es acceptable, then I expect that command to return and the share to be unmounted. From a usability perspective, stalling forever when I am explicitly forcing an action is not right. There is a workaround: and that is to assign the IP of the nfs server to my system then issue umount -f, however that hardly the best way since I am changing my network topology to unmount an offline filesystem. In some situations adding an IP to an interface is not possilble, and if the system is a remote system it could lead to more problems since it is mostly unresponsive. It would be greatly appreciated if a patch could be introduced that allows "umount -f" to actually work without making any other changes to a running system. The man page for umount even states that the -f argument can be used to unmount an unreachable nfs share -- but it almost never works. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-nfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
