Gnome and Firefox, lockd and NFS

[Tijl Coosemans]

Forwarding to rmacklem, our NFS developer.

On Thu, 13 Sep 2018 15:31:39 -0400 (EDT) Daniel Feenberg <feenberg at nber.org> wrote:
> We are using the NFS server on FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE-p7 to serve home 
> directories to Linux SL7 (same as Centos7 and RH7) clients via NFSv3. 
> While this worked fine with SL6, we find that starting Firefox, Gnome or 
> Mate causes the client to hang with the message:
> 
>     nfs server XXX not responding, still trying
> 
> and (for example)
> 
>     ~/.mozilla/firefox/XXX/.nfs00000000000XXXXXXXXX file stuck
> 
> If one tries to remove the lock, the client responds:
> 
>     Cannot remove, Device or resource busy
> 
> Furthermore, the server quickly stops serving *all* other clients also. If 
> we kill the client process, then the server recovers after a few minutes. 
> Our workaround has been to move the directories .local, .config and .dbus 
> in the home directory to an NFS partition that is mounting without 
> locking, but this seems inadequate as a permanent solution.
> 
> Since the FreeBSD server stops responding to other clients, it seems it 
> must be a FreeBSD problem. Even if the Linux client (systemd?) is making 
> an improper request, it is inappropriate for FreeBSD to hang in response. 
> We also see this same result with Truenas and FreeNAS fileservers (which 
> are based on FreeBSD) but see https://redmine.ixsystems.com/issues/927 for 
> another report related to earlier clients. A Linux NFS server does not 
> display this problem.
> 
> Daniel Feenberg
> National Bureau of Economic Research