NFSv4 in debian without portmap & co.

[Anders Andersson]

Hi! I'm trying to set up a simple NFSv4-only server here, and I
dislike running daemons that I don't need, so I'm trying to trim it
down a little. After some googling I found this document,
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/ref-guide/ch-nfs.html
that tells me: "NFSv4 has no interaction with portmapper, rpc.mountd,
rpc.lockd, and rpc.statd". Even more explicitly in the description of
portmap:

"portmap — The RPC service for Linux; it responds to requests for RPC
services and sets up connections to the requested RPC service. This is
not used with NFSv4."

So, I want to get rid of the portmapper. I run debian stable on my
server, so I simply stop the portmap service, make sure that it's
gone, and try to start the nfsd with this command, just for testing:
"rpc.nfsd -N2 -N3 8".

However, this will just freeze for a minute or so, then return without
starting up any kernel threads. I'm using the debian stable default
kernel which is a 2.6.18. Is this behaviour expected, and is there any
way to work around it, preferably without recompiling the kernel?

Debian will normally try to start the daemon with just "rpc.nfsd 8",
but I added the -N2 and -N3 to see if I could get rid of the freeze if
it didn't need to do any v2 or v3 code.