mini_fo renaming

Posted May 22, 2005 12:28 UTC (Sun) by markus78 (guest, #30082)
In reply to: The mini_fo filesystem by Ross
Parent article: The mini_fo filesystem

Renaming works differently for directories and non-directories. For example renaming a regular file will result in the file beeing marked as deleted (whiteouted), and then copied up to the storage branch with the new name. From now, renaming this file again will really only rename it in the storage branch.

Renaming directories is a lot more complicated, because we don't want to copy up all directory contents (by the way, this is what "mv" does when a file system's rename function returns -ENOSUPP). So what happens is that the original directory is whiteouted, a new empty directory with the new name is created in storage and both directories are associated by a special meta tag that is saved in the meta-data.

If you rename that directory in the underlying file system while the mini_fo file system is not mounted (you should not do this while it is mounted, see above post), this association will be broken, as mini_fo has no way to "detect" changes that occured while not mounted.