Invisible file problem

I have come on a situation where a file in a directory is not showing up in any directory listings, yet is still accessible by direct access. It shows up in listings on the server but not on the client. I did a capture of the NFS protocol traffic, and the file is showing up in the readdir call results. If I recreate the directory using the same file names but empty files, the behavior persists.

I am running vanilla 2.6.37.1 on both client and server, using NFSv4. The server filesystem is ext4.

Is this a kernel NFS client bug? Is there anything else I can do to diagnose the source of the problem, or any way to work around it?

Thanks.

There is a known bug in readdir that has been fixed in 2.6.38-rc6, but hasn't yet hit the 2.6.37 stable series. Please check the patch at

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git&a=commitdiff&h=d1205f87bbb8040c1408bbd9e0a720310b2b0b9b

and see if it fixes your problem.

Quoted 6 lines · Trond Myklebust

There is a known bug in readdir that has been fixed in 2.6.38-rc6, but hasn't yet hit the 2.6.37 stable series. Please check the patch at

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git&a=commitdiff&h=d1205f87bbb8040c1408bbd9e0a720310b2b0b9b

and see if it fixes your problem.

Yes it did, thank you very much.

Is this a server or client side issue BTW? I am trying to track something that could be related to this down.