Re: [PATCH 00/13] overlay filesystem: request for inclusion (v16)

From: Rob Landley
Date: Sat Mar 23 2013 - 03:02:35 EST


On 03/20/2013 02:41:08 PM, George Spelvin wrote:
Sorry for being so very late to the party, but rather than messing
with xattrs, why not just have a specific file (say, default /.whiteout,
but selectable via a mount option) and links to it are counted as
whiteout entries?

Don't the ext2 descendants have an array of reserved inodes at the beginning (one of which is the journal for ext3, most of which were still unused last I checked)?

Maybe ext4 optimized this away, but that would mean it doesn't have to be anywhere in the namespace.

(Of course you'd have to teach fsck about it, and probably not update the link count or you'll have contention and integer overflow...)

Rob--
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