"The Network File System (NFS) is a well-used distributed file system that enables file operations to be performed on a server from remote clients. The server makes its directories or filesystems available to the rest of the world using an operation known as export. To access these directories, the client mounts the exported directories or filesystems to its local directory hierarchy. Inside the mounted directory, clients access the remote files as if they were stored locally on the machine. Currently, NFS sports three available versions for exporting and mounting of directories or filesystems: versions 2, 3, and 4.
"In this article, we show you how to use a generic NFS mount to consolidate exporting and mounting of all existing NFS version into a single, seamless mechanism. Let's consider a scenario where the server has exported directory entries for all three versions of NFS. Currently, for the client to access all these entries, it has to separately mount each of these entries at different mount points. Although NFS version 4 provides a pseudo-tree mechanism that enables a single mount of all NFSv4 exported entries, it is applicable only to the entries made by that version. The client has to separately mount version 2 and 3 entries along with a single mount for version 4 (in case the pseudo-tree exists)."
