Using UNFS3 for Linux nfsroot ============================= General information about Linux nfsroot can be found in the Linux kernel source, in the file Documentation/nfsroot.txt. If you want the use the Linux kernel's "nfsroot=" boot option to use a root directory on an NFS server and use UNFS3 in the role of the NFS server for that, you need to remember that UNFS3 only supports NFSv3, not NFSv2. The kernel, on the other hand, always defaults to using NFSv2. Thus, you need to modify the nfsroot boot option to force the kernel to use NFSv3. If you do not do this, an error message like this will appear on the client machine: Looking up port of RPC 1000003/2 on 172.16.100.100 Root-NFS: Portmapper on server returned 2049 as nfsd port Looking up port of RPC 1000005/1 on 172.16.100.100 Root-NFS: mounted port is 2049 NFS: nfs_mount (ac106464:/nfsroot) RPC: call_verify: programm 100003 version 2 unsupported by server nfs_get_root: getattr error = 5 nfs_read_super: get root inode failed VFS: Unable to mount root fs via NFS trying floppy To fix this problem, append the "v3" NFS option to the nfsroot boot option. Assuming your NFS server's IP address is 192.168.2.72 and the path you need to mount is /tftpboot/nfsroot, the boot option should look like this: nfsroot=192.168.2.72:/tftpboot/nfsroot,v3 You can add more options to the end, seperated by commas. If you use DHCP to pass the NFS server configuration to the client, you need to use a line like this in the /etc/dhcpd.conf settings for the client machine: option root-path "/tftpboot/nfsroot,v3"; As above, more options can be added to the end, sepereated by commas. Thanks go to Jean Aumont for suggesting this bit of information to be documented.