Question on mountd

[Olavi Kumpulainen]

Hi guys,

I notice that mount SIGHUP’s mountd every time mount succeeds. The SIGHUP causes mountd to remount all exported directories.If this happens while a NFS-client is accessing a share, an access error may occur.
For this purpose, there is an option to mount, -S, which locks nfsd while the remount is executing.

Can anyone of you share why mount needs to SIGHUP mountd in the first place? It would make sense if mountd is restarted whenever /etc/exports is modified, but always seems like overkill.

/Olavi