Sidebar: A Note on Terminology

In this article, "semantic differences" is used in a broader sense than in the X/Open XNFS specification. The X/Open specification lists many semantic differences for utilities over NFS. Most of the semantic differences addressed in the specification concern implementation issues, such as client attribute caching and synchronization of event timing. These are semantic differences that exist between local access and NFS access. They are characteristic of the protocol and would be present even if the client and server were identical.

Here I use "semantic differences" to describe the total difference in behavior seen between the local and remote filesystems, not just the differences due to artifacts of the NFS protocol.