Hi Lorenzo,

> I realize that flock and other flavors of advisory locking are not
> officially supported by PVFS through VFS. However, with my setup of one
> PVFS client machine, four I/O servers, and one metadata server
> (different from the client machine), it does appear that multiple
> applications and/or threads, on the one client machine, calling flock on
> a pvfs2 file-system file behave correctly.  This can be tested using the
> (FC5) flock application. As expected, this does not work with multiple
> client machines.

A generic flock() mechanism is implemented in the VFS layer
fs/locks.c. Network file systems that allow clients to run on other
physically separate machines require more code than what the VFS layer
does to serialize readers.writers on a single node.
We havent done that yet for PVFS and hence it wont work on multiple client
nodes as you indicate below.

> Now the question:  Is the behavior I'm observing by design, or is it
> some coincidence that should not be relied upon.

So it should work as long as they are all threads/processes on the same
machine/running on the same kernel.
Thanks,
Murali

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