A.P. Lawrence

2004/11/21 unionfs

There, wasn't that helpful?

Just kidding: So what's a union mount? Imagine you have a directory with files in it, and you then mount some device on that directory. Ordinarily, the original files would no longer be available, but a union mount leaves them visible: you can see both the files from the device you mounted and the files that were originally in the directory you mounted it on.

This mixing raises interesting problems - for example what happens if there are identically named files? I'm not going to go into the details of all this here because it takes a lot of space and it makes my head hurt, but this is where whiteouts come into play. The basic issue is that the "upper" layer is the last thing mounted, and although everything below is visible, if you want to delete something in the lower layer, you really can't; a "whiteout" in the upper layer makes it seem to be deleted.

Union mounts have been available in BSD and Mac OS 10, see http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-unionfs.html for Linux. Interestingly, unionfs allows you to create snapshots.

If you really want to know about whiteouts, go read

http://www.google.com/ search?q=cache:dx6PtfUYrKcC:www.usenix.org/ publications/library/proceedings/neworl/ full_papers/mckusick.ps+bsd+whiteouts &hl=en&ie=UTF-8

A common use is in Live Cd's: the read only cd file system is paired with a writeable file system on a hard drive.

Psst - Wanna work for yourself?

Comments


Sun Nov 19 10:43:37 2006: Subject:   drag
Oh, UnionFS is nice. Lots of flexibility.



For instance I wanted to have a Linux install on a USB key. It would operate in similar fasion to 'live linux cdroms' but instead of having the top layer of the stack be in tmpfs it would be writing out to the usb pen drive.

By using Squashfs (read only compressed file system) I was able to make the equivelent of 1.3 or so gigs of disk space compress down to under 700 megs. I don't remember the actual amount. Using Unionfs I was able to make it seems fully writable and have this be persistant through reboots.

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