WARNIG: NFS3-server broken in RH-7.3 XFS Installer

[Andreas Korn <korn@caxopen.de>]

I had a newly install box with RH-7.3 and the XFS installer disk running 
as nfs-server (NFS3). The kernel was the precompiled kernel from the 
installer (2.4.18-4SGI_XFS_1.1). The disks had xfs filesystem. The nfs 
server would occasionally hang for some time (several minutes) and 
sometimes recover. During this time the kupdated process used all 
available CPU time and the nfsd processes had been put to sleep (or 
maybe deadlocked). Everything else was ok. After this I ran bonnie on 
some NFS mounts and I would hang shortly after all buffers on the server 
were used up. bonnie exited with an I/O error. The server showed the 
same behavior  but never recovered. I had hangs with lokally mounted 
nfs, too.
After switching to kernel 2.4.19-rc1 with the appropriate xfs-patch all 
was well again. On another box with plain 2.4.18 + xfs-1.1 the problem 
also didn't occur. Only with the kernel from the installer.

This is only intended as a warning for all who may want to use similar 
setup.

Andreas

-- 
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards,
for they are subtle and quick to anger!