suns would survive server outages. At least in the 90s. Linux NFS had its own ideas for failure.
Statelessness, like everything, has its good and bad points. Note that NFS was never truly stateless for v2 and later; servers had to have a dup cache, for practical reasons. Stateless is not cheap. NFS does not even have a mount rpc, for example, so every packet carries with it authentication information and user identity. Every. Single. One. But you could reboot a server, and you'd see the infamous "nfs server not responding still trying" on the client for hard mounts. For soft mounts, you'd see data loss. For spongy mounts, well, some combination of the two :-) When all is said and done, like it or not, NFS has had greater success than 9p, for all kinds of reasons, some of which make sense, others which don't. On Sun, Feb 8, 2026 at 1:01 PM Ethan Azariah <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Feb 8, 2026, at 3:10 PM, Alyssa M wrote: > > I seem to recall NFS will even > > survive a server reboot by being stateless (not that I've actually > > tried that...) > > I forget exactly which NFS version I was using back in 2004, but programs > with open files didn't survive me tripping over an ethernet cable despite > the disconnect not lasting 10 seconds. Server & client were Linux. I > remember wondering what NFS's statelessness was for, exactly, though I > guess the failure to 'come back' might have been an implementation issue. > Newer NFS versions aren't stateless. > > Surviving a server reboot would be nice though. :) ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Te8d7c6e48b5c075b-Mbf4d68b3e4daf920dd4c2edb Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
