Hua Zhong reported an NFS regression in 2.6.23-rc4 as compared to 2.6.22, "[upgrading] causes several autofs mounts to fail silently - they just [do] not appear when they should." Trond Myklebust explained that the change to default behavior was intentional to prevent an NFS mount from being mounted with the wrong options. The patch also introduced a new mount option, "the new option is there in order to make it damned clear to sysadmins that this is a dangerous thing to do: mounts which don't share the same superblock also don't share the same data and attribute caches. Any file or directory which appears in both mounts had better only be used by one application at a time or be using an appropriate locking scheme." Jakob Oestergaard defended the change asserting, "what he 'broke' is, for example, a ro mount being mounted as rw. That *could* be a very serious security (etc.etc.) problem which he just fixed. Anything depending on read-only not being enforced will cease to work, of course, and that is what a few people complain about(!)."

Linus Torvalds disagreed strongly with the change, "that commit gets reverted or fixed. It's a regression, and your theories that it's 'better' that way are obviously broken." He added:

"The point being that you just disallowed people from doing things that are sane but _potentially_ dangerous. That's not how we work. The UNIX way is to give people rope - if you cannot *prove* that what they are doing is wrong, then you damn well better not disallow it."

In response to the concern that the changes to NFS were necessary to fix a security hole, Linus retorted, "this is *not* a security hole. In order to make it a security hole, you need to be root in the first place. So what you call a security hole is really no different from root installing a bad SUID binary. It's simply not the kernels place to then say 'SUID binaries will not work, because it's a potential security hole'."