Desktop freeze on NFS share failure

[Martin (KDE)]

Am Mittwoch, 19. August 2015, 21:42:37 schrieb Patrick O'Callaghan:
> On Wed, 2015-08-19 at 12:20 -0700, Emmett Culley wrote:
> > The issue here is why does KDE stop, like a single threaded windows
> > 3.1, when an NFS share disappears?
> 
> Very well put.

Hm, is it?

The question is more general. There are many programs and systems out there 
failing badly (with different types of errors - from crash up to reboot) if 
NFS fails. I run some VMWare ESXi Servers on NFS shares and they fail very 
hard if NFS goes down for few seconds. Only recovery is to reboot all 
connected VMWare Servers.

This must not be an excuse for KDE doing the same.

KDE (and Plasma and ...) uses Sockets and databases located in your home 
folder. Both are known to be bad in loosing their underlying file systems. 
This is not special to KDE, same is true for Gnome (at least partially).

There was a very old discussion on the kde mailing list (may be six years ago 
or even longer) about NFS and KDE with the conclusion, that NFS is no good 
idea for your home directory on modern graphical environments.

In the mean time I doubt that NFS in its current state is sufficient for 
linux. There are three different types of file access rules (normal unix acl, 
posix acl and nfs own acls) and you can not change NFS acls witch any modern 
graphical environment. This must not be NFSs fault, may be it is in the linux 
tools.

And NFS is no good option at all if it comes to wifi. It is slow and it does 
not recover very well if the connection breaks for a few seconds (at least 
with my latest tests three years ago) if you have open files on the NFS 
storage.

In consequence of this I switched from NFS based home drives to local home 
drive and sync from/to server at every login/logout. With this I can use my 
laptop even if there is no network available. And since sssd users login 
informations are cached.

My thoughts on this
Martin

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