Over on the Fediverse, I shared an unhappy learning experience :

Linux kernel NFS: we don't have mandatory locks.
Also Linux kernel NFS: if the server has delegated a file to a NFS client that's now not responding, good luck writing to the file from any other machine. Your writes will hang.

NFS v4 delegations are an feature where the NFS server, such as your Linux fileserver , hands a lot of authority over a particular file over to a client that is using that file. There are various sorts of delegations, but even a basic read delegation will force the NFS server to recall the delegation if anything else wants to write to the file or to remove it. Recalling a delegation requires notifying the NFS v4 client that it has lost the delegation and then having the client accept and respond to that. NFS v4 clients have to respond to the loss of a delegation because they may be holding local state that needs to be flushed back to the NFS server before the delegation can be released.

(After all the NFS v4 server promised the client 'this file is yours to fiddle around with, I will consult you before touching it'.)

Under some circumstances, when the NFS v4 server is unable to contact the NFS v4 client, it will simply sit there waiting and as part of that will not allow you to do things that require the delegation to be released. I don't know if there's a delegation recall timeout, although I suspect that there is, and I don't know how to find out what the timeout is, but whatever the value is, it's substantial (it may be the 90 second 'default lease time' from nfsd4_init_leases_net() , or perhaps the 'grace', also probably 90 seconds, or perhaps the two added together).

(90 seconds is not what I consider a tolerable amount of time for my editor to completely freeze when I tell it to write out a new version of the file. When NFS is involved, I will typically assume that something has gone badly wrong well before then.)

As mentioned, the NFS v4 RFC also explicitly notes that NFS v4 clients may have to flush file state in order to release their delegation, and this itself may take some time. So even without an unavailable client machine, recalling a delegation may stall for some possibly arbitrary amount of time (depending on how the NFS v4 server behaves; the RFC encourages NFS v4 servers to not be hasty if the client seems to be making a good faith effort to clear its state). Both the slow client recall and the hung client recall can happen even in the absence of any actual file locks; in my case, the now-unavailable client merely having read from the file was enough to block things.

This blocking recall is effectively a mandatory lock, and it affects both remote operations over NFS and local operations on the fileserver itself. Short of waiting out whatever timeout applies, you have two realistic choices to deal with this (the non-realistic choice is to reboot the fileserver). First, you can bring the NFS client back to life, or at least something that's at its IP address and responds to the server with NFS v4 errors. Second, I believe you can force everything from the client to expire through /proc/fs/nfsd /clients/<ID>, by writing 'expire' to the client's 'ctl' file. You can find the right client ID by grep'ing for something in all of the clients/*/info files.

Discovering this makes me somewhat more inclined than before to consider entirely disabling 'leases', the underlying kernel feature that is used to implement these NFS v4 delegations (I discovered how to do this when investigating NFS v4 client locks on the server ). This will also affect local processes on the fileserver, but that now feels like a feature since hung NFS v4 delegation recalls will stall or stop even local operations.