Hi, I noticed that you can still unmount the lower/upper/work layers, even if they're currently part of an active overlay mount. This is the case even when files in the overlay mount are currently open. After unmounting, the usual effects of a lazy umount can be observed, like still active loop devices. Is this intentional? From a quick look, for open files this might be a side effect of using open_with_fake_path, but just getting a reference to the paths in ovl_mount_dir and preventing unmounting for the duration of the overlay mount would cover that as well AFAICT. Thanks, Fabian ---< demo script >--- #!/bin/bash set -euxo pipefail tmpdir=$(mktemp -d) trap "rm -rf $tmpdir" EXIT mkdir ${tmpdir}/{lower,upper,work,mount} # Create ext4 fs, mount as lower dd if=/dev/zero of=${tmpdir}/fs.img bs=1M count=10 mkfs.ext4 -q ${tmpdir}/fs.img mount ${tmpdir}/fs.img ${tmpdir}/lower # Create a file echo "This is in lower" > ${tmpdir}/lower/lowerfile # Mount overlayfs mount -t overlay overlay ${tmpdir}/mount -o lowerdir=${tmpdir}/lower,workdir=${tmpdir}/work,upperdir=${tmpdir}/upper # Open the file and print its contentghzogo8ugz312 iutv123u1 exec 3<${tmpdir}/mount/lowerfile cat <&3 # Umount the lower fs umount ${tmpdir}/lower && echo "Lower successfully unmounted" # Show that the overlay mount is still there mountpoint -q ${tmpdir}/lower || echo "Lower is not mounted anymore" mountpoint -q ${tmpdir}/mount && echo "Overlay still mounted" cat ${tmpdir}/mount/lowerfile # Clean up exec 3<&- umount ${tmpdir}/mount