From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: NeilBrown Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/7] overlay filesystem: request for inclusion Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2011 11:59:34 +1000 Message-ID: <20110609115934.3c53f78f@notabene.brown> References: <1306932380-10280-1-git-send-email-miklos@szeredi.hu> <20110608153208.dc705cda.akpm@linux-foundation.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Miklos Szeredi , viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk, torvalds@linux-foundation.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, apw@canonical.com, nbd@openwrt.org, hramrach@centrum.cz, jordipujolp@gmail.com, ezk@fsl.cs.sunysb.edu, mszeredi@suse.cz To: Andrew Morton Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20110608153208.dc705cda.akpm@linux-foundation.org> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org On Wed, 8 Jun 2011 15:32:08 -0700 Andrew Morton wrote: > On Wed, 1 Jun 2011 14:46:13 +0200 > Miklos Szeredi wrote: > > > I'd like to ask for overlayfs to be merged into 3.1. > > Dumb questions: > > I've never really understood the need for fs overlaying. Who wants it? > What are the use-cases? https://lwn.net/Articles/324291/ I think the strongest use case is that LIVE-DVD's want it to have a write-able root filesystem which is stored on the DVD. > > This sort of thing could be implemented in userspace and wired up via > fuse, I assume. Has that been attempted and why is it inadequate? I think that would be a valid question if the proposal was large and complex. But overlayfs is really quite small and self-contained. NeilBrown