| Hrm, latest version of man flock here, http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/flock.2.html, says:
NFS details In Linux kernels up to 2.6.11, flock() does not lock files over NFS (i.e., the scope of locks was limited to the local system). Instead, one could use fcntl(2) byte-range locking, which does work over NFS, given a sufficiently recent version of Linux and a server which supports locking. Since Linux 2.6.12, NFS clients support flock() locks by emulating them as fcntl(2) byte-range locks on the entire file. This means that fcntl(2) and flock() locks do interact with one another over NFS. It also means that in order to place an exclusive lock, the file must be opened for writing. Since Linux 2.6.37, the kernel supports a compatibility mode that allows flock() locks (and also fcntl(2) byte region locks) to be treated as local; see the discussion of the local_lock option in nfs(5).
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And D10 here http://nfs.sourceforge.net/ says similar:
D10. I'm trying to use flock()/BSD locks to lock files used on multiple clients, but the files become corrupted. How come?A. flock()/BSD locks act only locally on Linux NFS clients prior to 2.6.12. Use fcntl()/POSIX locks to ensure that file locks are visible to other clients.Here are some ways to serialize access to an NFS file.Use the fcntl()/POSIX locking API. This type of locking provides byte-range locking across multiple clients via the NLM protocol, or via NFSv4.Use a separate lockfile, and create hard links to it. See the description in the O_EXCL section of the creat(2) man page.It's worth noting that until early 2.6 kernels, O_EXCL creates were not atomic on Linux NFS clients. Don't use O_EXCL creates and expect atomic behavior among multiple NFS client unless you are running a kernel newer than 2.6.5.It's a known issue that Perl uses flock()/BSD locking by default. This can break programs ported from other operating systems, such as Solaris, that expect flock/BSD locks to work like POSIX locks.On Linux, using file locking instead of a hard link has the added benefit of checkpointing the client's cache with the server. When a file lock is acquired, the client will flush the page cache for that file so that any subsequent reads get new data from the server. When a file lock is released, any changes to the file on that client are flushed back to the server before the lock is released so that other clients waiting to lock that file can see the changes.The NFS client in 2.6.12 provides support for flock()/BSD locks on NFS files by emulating the BSD-style locks in terms of POSIX byte range locks. Other NFS clients that use the same emulation mechanism, or that use fcntl()/POSIX locks, will then see the same locks that the Linux NFS client sees.On local Linux filesystems, POSIX locks and BSD locks are invisible to one another. Thus, due to this emulation, applications running on a Linux NFS server will still see files locked by NFS clients as being locked with a fcntl()/POSIX lock, whether the application on the client is using a BSD-style or a POSIX-style lock. If the server application uses flock()BSD locks, it will not see the locks the NFS clients use.
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