Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >> > Well, these things have been around for over 20 years. What motivated >> > the developers of other OS's to develop these things and how are their >> > users using them? >> >> That's a good question, Erez might be able to answer that better. >> >> We have customers who need this for the "common base + writable >> configuration" case in a virtualized environment. >> >> Since overlayfs's announcement several projects have tried it and have >> been very good testers and bug reporters. These include OpenWRT, Ubuntu >> and other Debian based live systems. > > I assume that the live CD was your motivator for developing overlayfs? Actually no. The main motivator was that I started reviewing union-mounts and got thinking about how to do it better. >> > Another issue: there have been numerous attempts at Linux overlay >> > filesystems from numerous parties. Does (or will) this implementation >> > satisfy all their requirements? >> >> Overlayfs aims to be the simplest possible but not simpler. >> >> I think the reason why "aufs" never had a real chance at getting merged >> is because of feature creep. >> >> Of course I expect new features to be added to overlayfs after the >> merge, but I beleive some of the features in those other solutions are >> simply unnecessary. > > This is my main worry. If overlayfs doesn't appreciably decrease the > motivation to merge other unioned filesystems then we might end up with > two similar-looking things. And, I assume, the later and more > fully-blown implementation might make overlayfs obsolete but by that > time it will be hard to remove. > > So it would be interesting to hear the thoughts of the people who have > been working on the other implementations. Added J. R. Okajima (aufs maintainer) to CC. Thanks, Miklos -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
