[jandrese]

I understand the reasoning, but at the same time wonder if this isn't perfect being the enemy of good? Since there is no case where a timeout/error style exit can be guaranteed to never lose data we instead lock the entire box up when a NFS server goes AWOL. This still causes the data to be lost, but also brings down everything else.

[StillBored]

Well, soft mounts should keep the entire machine from dying, unless your running critical processes off the NFS mount. Reporting/debugging these cases can be fruitful.

OTOH, PXE/HTTPS+NFS root is a valid config, and there isn't really anyway to avoid machine/client death when the NFS goes offline for an extended period. Even without NFS linux has gotten better at dealing with full filesystems, but even that is still hit or miss.