An NFS server allows NFS-mount root file system (or NFS mount) on the targeting board. This is normally used during application development stage. The main idea here is to provide application/software developers a rapid turnaround during testing and development environment, because downloading the modified file system image to the target hardware is not necessary.

Windows PC solution

FreeNFS is a solution for all of you using a Windows PC.

Create a directory to share

We will add a directory called NFSshare in our home directory:

cd
mkdir NFSshare

Create the exports file

We will create a file named exports and add the following text line:

/Users/zoocad/NFSshare -mapall=zoocad -network 192.168.33.0 -mask 255.255.255.0

XXX -mapall=YYY -network ZZZ -mask 255.255.255.0

XXX = Path name of our shared directory
yyy = Name of the user account
ZZZ = IP of our network segment, e.g. if the Mac IP Address is 192.168.33.1 so our segnent is 192.168.33.0

If we like we can add more directory to share. When finished we copy this file to the /etc directory:

sudo cp exports /etc/.

Starting the NFS server

There are only a few commands needed to start the built-in NFS server on the Mac host.

To start:

sudo nfsd update

To show status:

sudo nfsd status

To show exported file systems:

showmount -e

The NFS server is up and running.

Mounting NFSshare in PetaLinux

After booting PetaLinux we can mount the NFSshare directory into the PetaLinux file system. Here is the command to mount it under the /mnt directory:

mount -o nolock -t nfs 192.168.33.1:/Users/zoocad/NFSshare /mnt -otcp,rsize=4096,wsize=4096

This is telling mount that

• we want to mount a file system of NFS type (-t NFS)
  
• the host of this file system has IP address 192.168.33.1
• the directory on that host we wish to mount is /Users/zoocad/NFSshare
• we want this file system to be mounted underneath the local /mnt directory
• data transfer uses TCP protocol (-otcp)
• the read and write operations should use block size of 4096

In order to export a file system in our host, we need to edit a file called /etc/exports. The file /etc/exports serves as the access control list for file systems which may be exported to NFS clients.

->sudo gedit /etc/exports




Example:

/home/svenand 192.168.56.0/24(rw,sync,insecure,no_subtree_check)

• rw
• sync
• insecure (must be used when exporting to Mac OS X)
  
• no_subtree_check

Start NFS sever

Use this command to start the NFS server:

->sudo service nfs-kernel-server start





Mount the exported file system

• 192.168.56.101 - IP address of NFS server
• /home/svenand - File system on the NFS server
• /Users/zoocad/linux-vm - Mount point on the client