Using Samba

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 will receive an error from the operating system and will 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 give time, as well as byte-range locking. In addition, Samba supports a new locking mechanism known in the Windows NT world as opportunistic locking— 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 on its own machine (and not on the Samba server) in order to speed up file access for that client. When Samba knows that a file has been opportunistically locked by a client, it marks its version as having an opportunistic lock and waits for the client to complete work on the file, at which point it expects the client to send the final changes back to the Samba server for synchronization.

If a second client requests access to that file before the first client has finished ...