README.NFS
1NFS exporting is supported in Linux kernels 2.6.27 or later.
2
3You need to add an fsid=NNN option to /etc/exports to make exporting a
4FUSE directory work.
5
6Filesystem support
7------------------
8
9NFS exporting works to some extent on all fuse filesystems, but not
10perfectly. This is due to the stateless nature of the protocol, the
11server has no way of knowing whether the client is keeping a reference
12to a file or not, and hence that file may be removed from the server's
13cache. In that case there has to be a way to look up that object
14using the inode number, otherwise an ESTALE error will be returned.
15
161) low-level interface
17
18Filesystems need to set FUSE_CAP_EXPORT_SUPPORT in conn->wants and
19implement special lookups for the names "." and "..". The former may
20be requested on any inode, including non-directories, while the latter
21is only requested for directories. Otherwise these special lookups
22should behave identically to ordinary lookups.
23
242) high-level interface
25
26Because the high-level interface is path based, it is not possible to
27delegate looking up by inode to the filesystem.
28
29To work around this, currently a "noforget" option is provided, which
30makes the library remember nodes forever. This will make the NFS
31server happy, but also results in an ever growing memory footprint for
32the filesystem. For this reason if the filesystem is large (or the
33memory is small), then this option is not recommended.
34