Michal Suchanek: > Probably swap the two above, you can't make a whiteout in presence of > the directory, right? > Anyway, you could just mark dirA as whiteout and remove any whiteouts > contained in it asynchronously, and only jump through these hoops when > trying to create a new entry in place of non-empty whiteout, or sync > on emptying the old whiteout before making a new entry. Unfortunately I cannot understand what you wrote. First, the order of > - create whiteout for dirA > - rename dirA to .wh..wh.XXXXXXXX is correct and I think it should be, in order to make a little help for fsck/auchk. And what is "non-empty whiteout" and "emptying the old whiteout"? The whiteout is a size zero-ed and hardlinked regular file in aufs. > Yes, it can only cause pollution with whiteouts unrelated to any files > that ever existed which is not too much of an issue unless people want > to add random stuff to the lower layer and see it in the union when > they reconstruct it again. ?? Do you think that the .wh..wh.XXXXXXXX hides something on the lower layer? If so, it is wrong. Such doubly whiteout hides nothing except itself. > It is only valid when in the upper layer of a union. However, so is > whiteout, and so are files that were visible in the union but are not > visible in the top layer if examined separately, outside of the union. Do you mean that your special symlink has totally different file-type from a symlink? Anyway what I want to say is, what such symlink refers may differ from what users originally expect. But I may misunderstand what you call "fallthru symlink". J. R. Okajima -- 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