Re: [PATCH] 2.4.19-rc1/2.5.25 provide dummy fsync() routine for directories on NFS mounts

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Trond Myklebust wrote:

> Hi,
> 
>    There was a bug reported on the 'exim' user list a couple of months ago: 
> the Linux NFS client reports -EINVAL if you try to fsync() a directory.
> 
>    The correct response would be to return a dummy '0' for success, since all 
> NFS operations that change the directory are supposed to be performed 
> synchronously on the server anyway...
> 
> Cheers,
>   Trond
> 
> 

Isn't it supposed to return EINVAL if "fd is bound to a file which
doesn't support synchronization..."  That's what POSIX 4 says.

Errors:
EBADF	fildes is not a valid file descriptor.
EINVAL	The file descriptor is valid, but the system doesn't support
	fsync on this particular file.

I think code that opens a directory as a file is broken. We have
opendir() for that and it returns a DIR pointer, not a file descriptor.
If the directory was properly opened, one would never attempt to
fsync() it.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.4.18 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).

                 Windows-2000/Professional isn't.