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There have been a number of recent reports that NFSROOT is no longer
working with default mount options, but fails only with certain NICs.

Brian Downing <bdowning@lavos.net> bisected to commit 56463e50 "NFS:
Use super.c for NFSROOT mount option parsing".  Among other things,
this commit changes the default mount options for NFSROOT to use TCP
instead of UDP as the underlying transport.

TCP seems less able to deal with NICs that are slow to initialize.
The system logs that have accompanied reports of problems all show
that NFSROOT attempts to establish a TCP connection before the NIC is
fully initialized, and thus the TCP connection attempt fails.

When a TCP connection attempt fails during a mount operation, the
NFS stack needs to fail the operation.  Usually user space knows how
and when to retry it.  The network layer does not report a distinct
error code for this particular failure mode.  Thus, there isn't a
clean way for the RPC client to see that it needs ...