Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] Add VFS support for looking up paths on remote servers using a temporary mount namespace

[Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>]

On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 10:58 -0500, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 01:45:34PM -0500, Trond Myklebust wrote:
> > The following two patches attempt to improve NFSv4's ability to look up
> > the mount path on a remote server.
> > 
> > The first patch adds VFS support for walking the remote path, using a
> > temporary mount namespace to represent the server's namespace, so that
> > symlinks
> 
> I'm a bit confused about the symlink case--I take it you're assuming
> that symlinks in the pseudofs should be interpreted as relative to the
> server's namespace (in keeping with traditional implementations of
> server exports), while symlinks elsewhere should continue to be
> intepreted relative to the client's namespace.
> 
> Do the rfc's say anything about this?

No, the RFCs say nothing, but interpreting symlinks as being relative to
the server namespace would be consistent with the mount behaviour of
NFSv2/v3. It also makes me uncomfortable to have a remote mount path
that could refer back to the client's namespace: that would not be an
NFS mount, but a local bind mount...

-- 
Trond Myklebust
Linux NFS client maintainer

NetApp
Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com
www.netapp.com