hi, I've been trying to understand some NFS state management errors seen on a recent (4.0) Linux kernel talking to a recent (I think) Netapp filer. I managed to get a tcpdump trace that shows that is happening quite nicely. It is fairly clear the the Linux client doesn't not handle the behaviour of the Netapp well. My main question is whether the Netapp behaviour is out-of-spec? If so, Linux should be fixed. If not, Linux maybe should be alert for this behaviour. There is only one file that is important. It is REMOVEd immediately before the following sequence - so we are sure neither client nor server thinks it exists. 1/ Client request open/writeonly/create/exclusive 2/ server grants with no delegation 3/ client writes to file 4/ client performs a LOOKUP, then OPEN, readonly 5/ server grants the open and provides a read-only delegation 6/ client uses OPEN_DOWNGRADE to give up read access - now writeonly again 7/ server grants 8/ application tries to create hardlink, so client tries to pro-actively return the delegation. Specifically requests an OPEN writeonly CLAIM_DELEGATE_CUR 9/ server denies - this causes an error message on client 10/ client sends LINK request to server 11/ server calls back asking for the delegation to be returned. 12/ client sends DELEGRTURN - server accepts 13/ server confirms that LINK has completed. I have reports which suggest that the state management thread starts spinning at this point, but I haven't been able to confirm that or get details yet. Step 5 is the questionable step. Should the netapp provide a read-only delegation when the client has a active write-only open? It seems a little odd, but I cannot see that it is clearly wrong. Currently this leads to the client having an open stateid which is read/write and a delegation stateid which is read-only. When it returns the read-only open with OPEN_DOWNGRADE it has an open stateid which is writeonly and a delegation stateid which is read-only. struct nfs4_state isn't able to record this distinction. It seems to assume that the open stateid and the delegation stateid will have the same access pattern. So when asked to return the delegation it assumes that the wronly open it has is associated with that delegation and so tries to return it. I'm guessing that 'struct nfs4_state' should get another 'fmode_t' which records the mode of 'stateid' (while the current "fmode_t state" refers only to open_stateid, and delegation->type refers only to delegation->stateid). I'll see what that does to the code, but I thought I'd ask first and describe the big picture in case I'm missing some important details of the protocol. Thanks, NeilBrown -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-nfs" in