On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Alessandro Pignotti <alexpigna.dev@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > the proposed patch would be useful in the following scenario > > 1) There is a large directory tree which needs to be fully read/write > accessible from many different users, although in an isolated way (i.d. > the changes made by Alice should not be visible to Bob) > 2) All users expect to be owning the files. (i.d. that everything is > private) > > With the proposed patch it is possible to store a single copy of the > base directory tree and use it as the lowerdir. The upperdir is then set > to a private user-writable directory. Each user as the illusion of a > private fully-writable installation as required. Moreover, since all the > changed files ends up in the upperdir it's easy to pack them for backup > purposes. Okay, makes sense. One issue, though, is that stat("x") and fd=open("x"); fstat(fd) will return different file stats (the fstat one will return the stats for the original file). This may confuse some apps. This is a something a "true" union filesystem can do better that union-mounts or overlayfs. 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