LWN: Comments on "Kernel Summit 2006: The VFS layer"

Kernel Summit 2006: The VFS layer

pj — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 16:45:53 +0000

unionfs isn't that much work anyway; I seem to recall it took me about 2 days to write one using an early version of FUSE - the main problem is deciding where/how to store whiteouts (markers that indicate that the file on the 'bottom' layer has been deleted).

Kernel Summit 2006: The VFS layer

dave0 — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 13:41:11 +0000

Another option for union filesystems is mapfs, which worked reasonably well last time I tried it. See http://www.levanta.com/mapfs/index.shtml and http://sourceforge.net/projects/mapfs

I think the Levanta people still use this on their production boxes, but the latest download available from sourceforge seems a bit old.

unionfs

k8to — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 13:08:22 +0000

I am using it at the moment, and have been for around a year now.

It is solid, if a bit large.

unionfs

BlueLightning — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 01:40:38 +0000

Indeed. I was reading that and thinking "huh? hasn't the work been done already?"

unionfs

gvegidy — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 22:10:23 +0000

Whats wrong about unionfs
(http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-unionfs.html) and merging it some
time in the future? It looks like they are doing the work neccessary and
there are enough users (especially live cd based distributions) to justify
it.