The WCFS documentation specifies [1]:

- - - 8> - - - 8> - - -

If a client, on purpose or due to a bug or being stopped, is slow to respond
with ack to file invalidation notification, it creates a problem because the
server will become blocked waiting for pin acknowledgments, and thus all
other clients, that try to work with the same file, will get stuck.

[...]

Lacking OS primitives to change address space of another process and not
being able to work it around with ptrace in userspace, wcfs takes approach
to kill a slow client on 30 seconds timeout by default.

- - - <8 - - - <8 - - -

But before this patch, this protection wasn't implemented yet: one
faulty client could therefore freeze the whole system. With this patch
this protection is implemented now: faulty clients are killed after the
timeout or any other misbehaviour in their pin handlers.

[1] https://lab.nexedi.com/nexedi/wendelin.core/blob/38dde766/wcfs/wcfs.go#L186-208

Preliminary history:

    levin.zimmermann/wendelin.core@24904e82
    levin.zimmermann/wendelin.core@b02dcadcCo-authored-by: Levin Zimmermann <levin.zimmermann@nexedi.com>

/discussed-on !18