Peter Staubach wrote:
> Chuck Lever wrote:
>> Hi all-
>>
>> The recent addition of the chk_mountpoint() function in 
>> utils/mount/mount.c in nfs-utils commit 3b55934b has broken a 
>> particular behavior of background mounts.
>>
>> nfs(5) states that, if the "bg" option is specified, "A missing mount 
>> point is treated as a timeout, to allow for nested NFS mounts."
>>
>> If I try mounting an NFS share onto a non-existent directory while 
>> using the "bg" option, I now get an immediate failure:
>>
>>   mount.nfs: mount point /mnt/nothere does not exist
>>
>> instead of the mount backgrounding itself to wait for /mnt/nothere to 
>> show up.  This is because chk_mountpoint() is causing the mount 
>> request to fail immediately.
>>
>> Is the documented bg retry behavior still desirable? 
> 
> Isn't this what autofs is for?  To be able to handle hierarchies
> of mounts?

I think the purpose of this feature is to allow a sysadmin to specify a 
set of mount points in /etc/fstab, some possibly nested.  "mount -a 
-tnfs" should work no matter what order the mounts in /etc/fstab are 
specified.

After all, some servers may be unresponsive when the client boots -- the 
mounting order is nondeterministic; it can't be depended on, in any event.

We also don't know if the automounter itself depends on this feature.