inconsistent file content after killing nfs daemon

[eric chacron <eric chacron vz cit alcatel fr>]

Hi Stephen,

I use ext3 with kernel 2.4.14. I'm happy to have verified that nfs+ext3
in journal mode doesn't provide
atomic write for the user point of view.

My program writes sequential records of 64KB in a file through a nfs
mount point. The blocks of data are
initialized with a serie of integer: 1, 2, 3 ...
I kill the nfsd daemons while two instance of the program are writing
their 600 records of
64KB in two distinct files.
Then using 'od' i look at the result, and i see some blocks of zero
inside the file. The size of these zeroed blocks seems to be multiple
of  h'4000.

NB: My clients and servers are colocalised on the same machine.
I obtained the same result with nfsv2 and nfsv3 mount option. I also
have the same result using ordered and writeback modes.

NB: when i have changed the program in order to initialize the pattern
for each record i cannot reproduce the problem ( it seems the timing was
changed, as more CPU was done before each write request).

Regards,
eric