[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] initscripts: NFS Root and Shutdown

[Jens Stimpfle]

Dear SysVinit Maintainers,

I wonder if Debian officially supports NFS root, especially if your 
packages do? One might assume so, as when I shutdown my diskless client that 
gets its root fs over nfs, a warning is emitted:

not deconfiguring network interfaces: network file systems still 
mounted.

which comes from /etc/init.d/networking stop, which comes after 
umountnfs stop.

But this particular setup unfortunately hangs by default, with the last  
command in rc0 when /sbin/shutdown is called, per default with -i flag 
to bring all network interfaces down (sysvinit:ifdown.c) just before 
telling the kernel to poweroff. That's because then it seems the kernel 
really is unable to umount the root nfs mount and thus doesn't poweroff.

I can workaround this by removing the -i flag from /etc/init.d/halt, but 
I wonder if this is really how it is meant to be.

To my further astonishment, it worked from another client (kvm machine) 
without removing the -i flag.

What do you think about this? Should initscripts normally work with nfs 
root, and can this be considered a bug? Could this be related to my 
custom kernel (but the kvm machine was run with the same one, just using 
another nic driver)?

Regards,
		Jens Stimpfle