Linux 5.6 NFS Client Adds New Option To Use Cache If NFS Server Connection Lost

With the NFS client are a few new features with its code to be found in Linux 5.6.

First up, the NFS client has added a "softreval" mount option that will let clients use any cache if the server disconnects/drops. rhe softreval mount option is also automatically enabled if the "softerr" mount option is active. This allows for attribute revalidation calls to time out and to fall-back to using cached attributes. This should allow NFS clients to still traverse paths based upon cached information and then to gracefully resume should the connection be restored.

The NFS client in Linux 5.6 has also adopted to the new mount API, fixed memory leaks and other bugs going back to Linux 2.6.37 kernels, adds an option to build without UDP support, better readdir concurrency, and other fixes.

More details on the NFS client changes for Linux 5.6 sent in today via this pull request.