On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 4:25 PM Alexander Larsson <alexl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 3:56 PM Miklos Szeredi <miklos@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 22 Aug 2023 at 15:22, Alexander Larsson <alexl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 1:00 PM Miklos Szeredi <miklos@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > On Thu, 17 Aug 2023 at 13:05, Alexander Larsson <alexl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > This is needed to properly stack overlay filesystems, I.E, being able
> > > > > to create a whiteout file on an overlay mount and then use that as
> > > > > part of the lowerdir in another overlay mount.
> > > > >
> > > > > The way this works is that we create a regular whiteout, but set the
> > > > > `overlay.nowhiteout` xattr on it. Whenever we check if a file is a
> > > > > whiteout we check this xattr and don't treat it as a whiteout if it is
> > > > > set. The xattr itself is then stripped and when viewed as part of the
> > > > > overlayfs mount it looks like a regular whiteout.
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > I understand the motivation, but don't have good feelings about the
> > > > implementation. Like the xattr escaping this should also have the
> > > > property that when fed to an old kernel version, it shouldn't
> > > > interpret this object as a whiteout. Whether it remains hidden like
> > > > the escaped xattrs or if it shows up as something else is
> > > > uninteresting.
> > > >
> > > > It could just be a zero sized regular file with "overlay.whiteout".
> > >
> > > So, I started doing this, where a whiteout is just a regular file with
> > > the xattr set. Initially I thought I only needed to check the xattr
> > > during lookup and convert the inode mode from S_IFREG to S_IFCHR.
> > > However, I also need to hook up readdir and convert DT_REG to DT_CHR,
> > > otherwise readdir will report the wrong d_type. To make it worse,
> > > overlayfs itself looks for DT_CHR to handle whiteouts when listing
> > > files, so nesting is not working without that.
> > >
> > > The only way I see to implement that conversion is to call getxattr()
> > > on every DT_REG file during readdir(), and while a single getxattr()
> > > on lookup is fine, I don't think that is.
> > >
> > > Any other ideas?
> >
> > Not messing with d_type seems a good idea. How about a random
> > unreserved chardev?
>
> Only the whiteout one (0,0) can be created by non-root users.
I was thinking of (ab)using DT_SOCK or DT_FIFO, but turns out you
can't store xattrs on such files.
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Alexander Larsson Red Hat, Inc
alexl@xxxxxxxxxx alexander.larsson@xxxxxxxxx
