On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 07:20:26PM -0700, Badhri Jagan Sridharan wrote: > Hi, > > I mounted overlayfs at / > > My cat /proc/mounts looks like the following. > # cat /proc/mounts > /dev/root / squashfs ro,seclabel,relatime 0 0 > .. > overlayfs / overlay > rw,relatime,lowerdir=/,upperdir=/cache/upper,workdir=/cache/working 0 > 0 > > The original blockdevice at fs root is squashfs formatted so doesnt > support write operations. I mounted overlayfs on fs root to cache the > writes made. > > While in /, the filesystem does not allow me to create files/directories, > if I dont prefix it with ".." directive. Chroot to the thing that overmounts root. All that .. is doing here is triggering the traversal to whatever covers the parent (== whatever covers the root itself, since the parent of root is the root itself). And we do *not* cross a mountpoint if the starting point of lookup happens to be covered. Might've been better if we did a different semantics, but this one is userland-exposed and, worse yet, a bunch of early boot userland code relies upon it. What you want is to be chrooted to whatever overmounts the global root. The easiest way is probably chroot("/..");chdir("/"); when you are setting the things up. Before you exec the final /sbin/init... -- 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