[Gnu-arch-users] Inode Sigs and tla on FAT/NFS (was: tla on nfs only)

[Greek0]

On Sat, 13 Mar 2004 12:50:24 +0100
Anders Rune Jensen <address@hidden> wrote:

> No, it doesn't work like Robert pointed out. Right now I have removed
> the inode check from the code and it seems to work great ;)

Yes, I think that would fix the tla-on-fat problem too, but then you
have the high risk of a corrupted library/pristine causing real
problems.

Inode signature validation is a good idea on filesystems where it works.
But IMHO there should be an alternative for FSes where it doesn't. Inode
nubers aren't consisent at all on fat, and afaik on nfs they aren't as
soon as you remount your nfs volume (just like device numbers). One real
problem on nfs is afaik that you can't even really rely on ctime, since
it isn't consistent across timezones (ok, in normal use cases this
shouldn't be too much of a problem, but it's another drawback). 

So on fat you could use filename, ctime and perhaps device numbers. On
nfs you haven't got much left to work with. So basically there you'd
have to check the file contents, if a corruption occured (given that my
knownledge about nfs is correct and I didn't miss anything obvious).

Cheers,
Greek0