Using Samba, Second Edition

Locks and Oplocks

Concurrent writes to a single file are not desirable in any operating system. To prevent this, most operating systems use locks to guarantee that only one process can write to a file at a time. Operating systems traditionally lock entire files, although newer ones allow a range of bytes within a file to be locked. If another process attempts to write to a file (or section of one) that is already locked, it receives an error from the operating system and will have to wait until the lock is released.

Samba supports the standard DOS and NT filesystem (deny-mode) locking requests—which allow only one process to write to an entire file on a server at a given time—as well as byte-range locking. In addition, Samba supports a locking mechanism known in the Windows NT world as opportunistic locking, or oplock for short.

Opportunistic Locking

Opportunistic locking allows a client to notify the Samba server that it will not only be the exclusive writer of a file, but will also cache its changes to that file locally to speed up access by reducing network activity. This can result in a large performance gain—typically 30%—while at the same time reserving network bandwidth for other purposes.

Because exclusive access can be obtained using regular file locks, the value of opportunistic locks is not so much to lock the file as it is to cache it. In fact, a better name for opportunistic locking might be opportunistic caching.

When Samba knows that a file in one of its shares has ...