[Automated-testing] Exporting an OverlayFS as NFS

[Tim.Bird at sony.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kieran Bingham on Friday, February 16, 2018 1:24 AM
> Hi Farmers:
> 
> In the recent LWN article: https://lwn.net/Articles/746791/ there is an
> excerpt
> highlighting that Overlay file systems can now (or will soon) export over
> NFS...
> 
> I've been waiting for this for a long time...:

... [interesting bits clipped]

> Only really posting this to raise awareness of what I think is a very useful
> feature coming to us in v4.16 - and perhaps raise some discussion on desired
> features - or perhaps to discover that no one really uses NFS root anymore;
> because 96boards didn't put an Ethernet connector on the design.
> 
> 
> I think there's certainly scope to build some useful tools on top of NFS
> exported overlays though.

This is an interesting development.  Thanks for sharing it.

I used to use NFS extensively in my previous farm.  I don't use it as much in my current
farm as I now run more benchmarks, and having the filesystem be over NFS skews the
results of some of them.
 -- Tim