Mounting NFSv4 as root fs

[Lawrence Stewart]

Hi Rick,

I've set up a NFS server to pxeboot a set of testbed clients from. The
server filesystem tree the client needs to use as its root has nullfs
mounted directories in it. Therefore, NFSv4 is the only useful way to
mount it on the client because of the cross mount point traversing
capabilities built into v4. I've verified that I can "mount_nfs -o nfsv4
..." on the command line and see all the files in the tree so I have
things working fine on the server side.

I was aware our pxeboot only supports NFSv3, but hoped that by
specifying "newfs" and "nfsv4" in the fstype and options fields
respectively in fstab that things might just work when the mount root
step after the kernel boot happens. It doesn't as I found out, because
of two issues:

1. I believe there is a bug in the newnfs code. nfs_diskless.c wasn't
copied from the old nfsclient and suitably modified for use with newnfs.
As a result during boot, the ncl_mountroot() function in nfs_clvfsops.c
calls nfs_setup_diskless() which calls into the old nfs code and badness
happens from there on in. I have a patch which fixes this issue, though
it may be completely the wrong way to do things as I'm very new (as in
24 hours new) to the NFS code.

2. pxeboot stores the filehandle and filehandle length it used to grab
the kernel via NFS in the kernel's env and after the kernel has booted,
it looks for these variables and reuses them i.e. at no point in the
process does the code attempt to upgrade to NFSv4 if the bootstrap uses
NFSv3 to grab the kernel.

For my particular use case, I'm quite happy for the kernel to be pulled
via NFSv3, but can't boot the client without somehow getting the client
to switch to NFSv4 at the point where it mount's root after the kernel
has finished booting.

I tried a very hacky test in mountnfs() in nfs_clvfsops.c to see if I
could set the NFSV4 flag, unset the V3 flag and tell the code to forget
about the cached file handle set by the loader just to see if the code
would try to renegotiate using v4... it crashed and burned.

So, before I spend any more time on this, I hope to get your (or anyone
else reading for that matter) thoughts on how best to proceed. Some
questions:

- Could you guesstimate how much work is involved to get v4 support into
libstand so that pxeboot can talk v4 natively? I spent quite some time
poking at libstand's code last night but don't understand the NFSv4 RPC
mechanism enough to attempt writing the basic code to do it yet. The RFC
explains the ordering of OPs needed quit well but I don't quite grok how
the data structures for interpreting responses work.

- Can you think of a hacky simple way to force my client to renegotiate
the mount as v4 at the time mount root happens?

Cheers,
Lawrence