[OpenAFS-devel] Re: [OpenAFS] namei interface lockf buggy on Solaris (and probably HP-UX and AIX)

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Thursday, September 14, 2006 05:49:05 PM -0400 Tom Keiser 
<tkeiser@gmail.com> wrote:

> Exactly!  Doing the fsync as-soon-as-possible is simply a hack to
> reduce the likelihood of an inevitable possibility.  There is no
> notion of atomic transactions in namei; namei link count updates and
> other metadata updates are effectively unrelated.

This is the same as with other filesystems, where the link count is 
maintained by the underlying filesystem and is unrelated to the fileserver 
metadata.  At least at one time, most filesystems wrote this data 
synchronously, and I believe the link table syncs are an attempt to be 
consistent with that behavior.