Looks like the NFS startup procedure is incorrect compared with other distributions: WRL5: start_nfsd "$NFS_SERVERS" start_mountd exportfs -a Debian: $PREFIX/sbin/exportfs -r /sbin/rpc.nfsd ... /sbin/rpc.mountd ... nfs-utils upstream: 22 Type=oneshot 23 RemainAfterExit=yes 24 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/exportfs -r 25 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd $RPCNFSDARGS 26 ExecStop=/usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd 0 27 ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -au 28 ExecStopPost=/usr/sbin/exportfs -f exportfs -r is supposed to setup a proper etab (at-least needed by mountd). But in Yocto this will will be 0 bytes when mountd starts, instead of proper data. The upshot of this is that on some very fast machines the following may be observed on first boot: 2015-03-02T10:09:15+00:00 xxxx rpc.mountd[3749]: couldn't open /var/lib/nfs/etab