Re: NFS/MOUNT/sunrpc problem?

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

On Mer, 2003-09-10 at 15:37, Marco Bertoncin - Sun Microsystems UK -
Platform OS Development Engineer wrote:
> - PXE booting x86 'headless' blades (2.0 Ghz 2P Xeon) to install RedHat 8.0 
> (kernel 2.4.18).

Update the kernel once installed, the 2.4.18- kernels are obsoleted by
other security fixes

> - the blade, after 3 seconds, starts a storm of retransmit (MOUNT reqs) that 
> won't stop, unless an ACK (one of the several ACKS sent for each retransmitted 
> requests) has the chance to get through. This is sometimes after a few hundreds 
> packets, sometimes after a lot more, causing an apparent hang of the 
> installation process, and what's even worse, bringing to a grinding halt the  
> server (bombarded by near 1Gbit/sec packets).

I've seen one other report of this (with a via chip),

> Ah, one last experiment I did was to try and reproduce the problem on an 
> installed blade (same version of the kernel). No chance. I noticed, though that 
> the MOUNT request sent by the 'installed linux' (it would be a proper i686-smp 
> build instead of a up i386) is V3, whilst that during installation is V2. 
> Thinking this might have been a hunch, I tried "mount -o nfsvers=2 
> server:/export /mnt": I saw the requests, the dropped ack (on the server side, 
> of course) but no storm ...!).

Are you using NFS root or just NFS mounts ?