[arch-dev-public] aufs / unionfs / aufs2
Thomas Bächler
thomas at archlinux.org
Sat Mar 28 17:54:38 EDT 2009
Dan McGee schrieb:
> What one is most likely to land in the kernel? I assume one of these
> has to be on track to actually get in, and we should go with that and
> be done with this mess.
unionfs has been in -mm for ages, and aufs2 has just been submitted for
mainline inclusion a few weeks ago.
> Why is it that everyone seems to use union filesystems, and yet none
> of them have matured enough to get in the tree?
When unionfs was first submitted, apart from coding style and
implementation issues, it had design problems, like non-consistent inode
numbers in some cases (which aufs2 solves, according to the author).
Also, it seems that people weren't happy about the general approach:
Rather than stacking filesystems, doing copyup and such, it was
suggested that a special filesystem should be designed that has its own
on-disk-format for storing differences between an underlying filesystem
and the actually visible filesystem. unionfs-odf does this, but
apparently it is not very mature.
For reference, here are the recent LKML discussions (most of the
information from above is from what I read here some time ago and
remembered):
23. Feb: aufs design and first comments
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.file-systems/29813
9. Mar: aufs source
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.file-systems/30026
16. Mar: aufs source, second try
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.file-systems/30160
This is a lot to read and I have no idea if and when this might be included.
However, we should be able to build this as an external module with only
a non-intrusive patch to the kernel (it exports some symbols that are
otherwise not exported), while I don't know how intrusive unionfs is.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 260 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/attachments/20090328/b99a052e/attachment.pgp>
More information about the arch-dev-public
mailing list