[PATCH v2 0/4] NFSv1 support

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 9:35 AM Christian Gmeiner
<christian.gmeiner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> > >
> > > This patch series adds support for NFSv1 and is more
> > > or less a rebased version of an older series.
> > >
> > > During V1 there was a discussion if it really makes sense
> > > to bring more features into the network stack of U-Boot as it
> > > is just a bootloader. As TCP support landed I thought I might
> > > give this patch series another try.
> >
> > So the real question is what use does this bring? TCP is useful
> > because it can enable support for modern features like UEFI HTTP boot.
> > What is the use of NFSc1? The Linux kernel is removing support for
> > NFSv2 and according to wikipedia v1 was only ever used internally to
> > Sun so I'm not sure what the wider use of this functionality would be?
> >
>
> You know there are other operating systems used in the wild. One of them is
> vxworks. The company I work for supports software versions for more than 10
> years and customers do not want to update to newer software versions
> as the process
> of approval for wind turbines/parks is very costly and time intensive.
> For security
> issues we provide patches for older versions that the customers are
> switching to.

Are there deployments that are updating to new versions of U-Boot that
require NFSv1 though?

> We are shipping devices right now which are based on vxworks 5. Some
> customers are using our "processor modules" as NFS server for e.g. other
> "processor modules" to boot from. If you want/need I can go into further details
> about our use case.

So they're using a 25 year old version of vxworks with the latest
version of U-Boot? And vxworks supports only NFSv1, and not NFSv2,
which has been out since 1989 and was the first version that even Sun
supported publicly?

> So I know It is a quite specific use case but we want to upstream most
> of our downstream
> patches.
>
> Btw. if this patch series will not land does this mean NFSv2 will die too soon?

At least NFSv2 is supported to some degree whereas it seems NFSv1 is
something that's special to vxworks, how are people supposed to test
it? I don't see any tests in your patchset and I'm not sure how it's
useful outside of the legacy vxmworks use case.

At the very least this should be behind a Kconfig option.

Peter