After some more investigation, it appears that the problem isn't NFS, but rather verilog-mode.el. All of my verilog files were on the NFS partition, while my files on the ext4 partition were not verilog files. Since this isn't a standard mode, you can close this out and I will work with the maintainer of verilog-mode.el on this issue.

Thanks.

On Fri, Jan 18, 2019 at 2:13 PM Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

The symptoms you report are pretty strange, especially since I imagine
lots of people have used Emacs 25 with NFS. I suggest trying again with
Emacs 26.1 (the latest version). Another possibility is to run the
command "strace -o $HOME/trace emacs" instead of "emacs", and then look
at the system calls that Emacs is executing for your file.