Issues with Symlinks via NFS

[willsy32]

Tried mounting batocera via NFS just to test if I could get it working on my rocknix (retroid pocket 5) device and for some reason both devices have issues with using symlinks. I'm not super familiar with NFS so if someone could help me or educated me, that'd be helpful. Also if retronas ever supports rocknix NFS that would be cool too: https://rocknix.org/play/add-games/

[jeffbrl]

I am also encountering this issue. When rocknix (or any NFS client for that matter), mounts the retronas NFS share, the symlinks point to files that don't exist on the client Unless I'm missing something, users can't use retronas's NFS functionality in its current state. I suspect NFS handles symlinks differently from SMB.

I'm considering workarounds like using rclone to copy batocera dirs and constituent files to a new directory. This defeats the purpose of having a single ROM library to maintain so I'm hoping there is a better solution,.

[willsy32]

@jeffbrl If I remember correctly I used hardlinks as a workaround, but yeah it defeated the purpose of having roms all in one location. I also moved on from rocknix as well since I found out most portmaster games have even better android versions of the ports (at least in my cases)

[sairuk]

nfs resolves symlinks client side while samba resolves them server side, we only support cifs (samba) for other systems because of this. if you want to use nfs with any other systems you'll have to mount the main /data/retronas export as documented then adjust the paths of the application as applicable

# mount -t nfs testronas:/data/retronas/batocera /mnt/tmp/
# ls -la /mnt/tmp/ROMS/vircon32/
ls: cannot access 'vircon32/': No such file or directory

vs

# mount -t nfs testronas/data/retronas /mnt/tmp/
# ls -la /mnt/tmp/batocera/ROMS/vircon32/
total 8
drwxrwxr-x  2 1000 1000 4096 Nov 27 08:48 .
drwxrwxr-x 10 1000 1000 4096 Nov 27 08:48 ..

[jeffbrl]

@sairuk, thank you for weighing in. I think your suggestion will work but will require me to dive deeper into rocknix's merged storage implementation. I suspect bind mounts are going to play some role in getting this working.

…

On Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 17:09 sairuk ***@***.***> wrote: nfs resolves symlinks client side while samba resolves them server side, we only support cifs (samba) for other systems because of this. if you want to use nfs with any other systems you'll have to mount the main /data/retronas export as documented then adjust the paths of the application as applicable — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#140 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAH3BALK2PQF5T4PC5XU76L36YQJNAVCNFSM6AAAAACNIUZK32VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTKMBZGA4TOMI> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>