Re: mean vfs bug in *bsd

[green () FELDMAN DYN ML ORG (Brian Feldman)]

> As we upgraded to freeBSD 2.2.6-STABLE the following bug came to my
attention:
> when linking a device like /dev/null to a file on a NFS mounted fs
> the machien freeses.
A hard link links via a true link, as follows: a symlink is just a
specially marked file with the path and name of another file which it
refers to. A _hard_ link creates a new fs entry and sets its data inode
number to point to that of the other file, in which case it becomes the
file. In this way a hard link does NOT traverse different file
systems/mount points whatsoever. I'm pretty certain your /dev is locally
mounted, not by NFS, therefore I tend to believe that you shouldn't even
be attempting a hard link. If in actuality, this does occur linking two
files, one a device, both on the same NFS filesystem, then this is
significant, otherwise it just means that ln(1) needs to have some better
error-checking so it doesn't make hard links span drives.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
my->name        =       "Brian Feldman";
my->email[0]    =       "brianfeldman () hotmail com";
my->email[1]    =       "green () feldman dyn ml org";
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=