Re: Overlay filesystem

From: Marc SCHAEFER (schaefer@alphanet.ch)
Date: Thu Apr 20 2000 - 03:13:03 EST


Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu> wrote:
> > /overlay has all files / filesystem has, plus many more. For example,
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> What for? Why do you want to do it for every bloody file?

I assume it's not a copy, those are pointers.

Another application than transparent unarchiving, etc, could be:

   cat /overlay/file

if /file exists, it display /file. If it doesn't, it call the user
process to generate file, e.g. unmigrate from remote storage.

I have precizely done that, but not with podfuk, but with FIST instead.
The concept works, but it is not finished yet.

   http://www-internal.alphanet.ch/~schaefer/mfs.html

However with mfs *you always have the inodes on disk*, ie the inodes
ALSO exist on the virtual file system. But they are empty, and they
use a flag to say `I am migrated'. So the user-level process is
only activated for stat(), open(), write() (if the fs overfulls only),
unlink(), rename(). Once it's unmigrated, the inode number doesn't change,
and I/O is done directly to fs.

Keeping resident inodes was the only easy way to make sure things
like NFS work (and made everything easier).

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