When using a 4.X kernel FAI uses overlayfs on top of the read-only nfsroot for making it writeable. This works only when using NFS v3. I'm pretty sure this must be fiexed in overlayfs.
If the install client mounts the nfsroot via NFSv4 (using NFS 4.2 with the recent 4.9 kernel) the nfsroot will remain read-only and FAI cannot proceed. You can force NFS v3 on the server side by adding a line to /etc/exports as described in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=676883#10 Or you can add a nfs option into the pxelinux.cfg file when specifying the mount address for the nfsroot: root=1.2.3.4:/srv/fai/nfsroot:vers=3 If you want to experiment with different NFS v4 versions (using minorversion) you can use something like this root=1.2.3.4:/srv/fai/nfsroot:vers=4,minorversion=0 BTW, there's a new package aufs-dkms which includes aufs for 4.X kernel. It did not test it yet. Maybe this is a solution for using nfsroot via NFS v4 using a 4.X kernel. -- regards Thomas