On Tue, Jun 11 2019, Chuck Lever wrote:

>
> Earlier in this thread, Neil proposed to make nconnect a hint. Sounds
> like the long term plan is to allow "up to N" connections with some
> mechanism to create new connections on-demand." maxconn fits that idea
> better, though I'd prefer no new mount options... the point being that
> eventually, this setting is likely to be an upper bound rather than a
> fixed value.

When I suggested making at I hint, I considered and rejected the the
idea of making it a maximum.  Maybe I should have been explicit about
that.

I think it *is* important to be able to disable multiple connections,
hence my suggestion that "nconnect=1", as a special case, could be a
firm maximum.
My intent was that if nconnect was not specified, or was given a larger
number, then the implementation should be free to use however many
connections it chose from time to time.  The number given would be just
a hint - maybe an initial value.  Neither a maximum nor a minimum.
Maybe we should add "nonconnect" (or similar) to enforce a single
connection, rather than overloading "nconnect=1"

You have said elsewhere that you would prefer configuration in a config
file rather than as a mount option.
How do you imagine that configuration information getting into the
kernel?
Do we create /sys/fs/nfs/something?  or add to /proc/sys/sunrpc
or /proc/net/rpc .... we have so many options !!
There is even /sys/kernel/debug/sunrpc/rpc_clnt, but that is not
a good place for configuration.

I suspect that you don't really have an opinion, you just don't like the
mount option.  However I don't have that luxury.  I need to put the
configuration somewhere.  As it is per-server configuration the only
existing place that works at all is a mount option.
While that might not be ideal, I do think it is most realistic.
Mount options can be deprecated, and carrying support for a deprecated
mount option is not expensive.

The option still can be placed in a per-server part of
/etc/nfsmount.conf rather than /etc/fstab, if that is what a sysadmin
wants to do.

Thanks,
NeilBrown