Re: ca4c8a3a800039 ovl: treat special files like a regular fs

[Anisse Astier <anisse@astier.eu>]

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 06:53:16PM +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 05:20:48PM +0200, Anisse Astier wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Would it be possible to backport upstream commit
> > ca4c8a3a800039c2681d609c5b7491c1bd17c0a7 into 4.9 ?
> > 
> > 	From: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@redhat.com>
> > 	ovl: treat special files like a regular fs
> > 
> > 	No sense in opening special files on the underlying layers, they work just
> > 	as well if opened on the overlay.
> > 
> > 	Side effect is that it's no longer possible to connect one side of a pipe
> > 	opened on overlayfs with the other side opened on the underlying layer.
> > 
> > 
> > Before this it's impossible to do in-kernel resolution of a device file,
> > for example to mount or use dmsetup.
> 
> So, this adds a new feature, and does not fix a bug, right?  :)

That's correct. I thought earlier version behaved this way, after some
testing it seems they did not.

> 
> > Miklos, you say this might cause a behaviour change in a very
> > particular case; but did it cause an issue upstream since it was merged
> > in 4.10 ?
> > 
> > I also wish this was fixed in 4.1, so I did a tentative backport below.
> > What do you think Sasha, Miklos ?
> 
> What is preventing you from using a newer kernel like 4.13 if you rely
> on this new feature?

Nothing fancy here, that's what you get when using lots of non-upstream
code from a vendor.

Regards,

Anisse