Re: what's the current wisdom on git over NFS/CIFS?

From: Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@viscovery.net>
Date: Jul 3, 2009, 06:14 UTC
Message-ID: <4A4DA1D6.40301@viscovery.net>
In-Reply-To: <2e24e5b90907021752t10243468sc07be88cd88ac5c1@mail.gmail.com>

Sitaram Chamarty schrieb:

Show 24 quoted lines

> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 2:28 AM, Linus
> Torvalds<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>> Btw, I think we fixed the problem we had with CIFS. That one was a cifs
>> filesystem problem on Linux, but it should be fixed in 2.6.30+ (commit
>> 0f4d634c: "cifs: flush data on any setattr"). If you have an older kernel
>> (or are just uncertain), you can also work around it with
>>
>>        [core]
>>                fsyncobjectfiles = true
>>
>> which may be a good thing in general (regardless of any cifs issues), but
>> in most cases the performance loss isn't worth it if your filesystem is
>> stable and sane.
> 
> Though I asked this following from a debate on IRC, it now looks as if
> this will solve another of my problems too.
> 
> Let me explain.
> 
> I'm evangelising git at work, and although most projects are happy,
> even eager to setup a proper server for git, and those that can't are
> happy to just use mine, there are a couple of projects that are almost
> exclusively Windows _and_ cannot add another machine _and_ have client
> confidentiality issues so they can't just use my server.

I don't exactly understand why your reply with this Windows story to the fsyncobjectfiles paragraph. But if you think that fsyncobjectfiles+msysgit is your killer argument, then you think wrong: fsyncobjectfiles is ignored in msysgit. (We don't yet have an implementation of fsync() :-( )

The issue that Linus mentioned happened when a Linux client operates in a repository that lives on a CIFS mount.

Show 7 quoted lines

> My alternatives for them so far were (1) VirtualBox running Fedora or
> something within one of their beefier Windows servers or (2) the whole
> cygwin install, which is painful compared to msysgit.
> 
> Sounds like we can just do it with traditional Windows fileshares, as
> long as we make sure no one does a "git gc" on the bare repo that is
> being shared.  That's a very small price to pay!

It will work with the caveat you mention. I have such a setup myself.

-- Hannes