Re: [PATCH/RFC] make btrfs subvol mounts appear in /proc/mounts

From: J. Bruce Fields
Date: Mon Nov 02 2015 - 15:50:22 EST


On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 07:25:10AM +0900, Neil Brown wrote:
>
> If you create a subvolume in btrfs and access it (by name) without
> mounting it, then the subvolume looks like a separate mount to some
> extent, returning a different st_dev to stat(), but it doesn't look like
> a separate mount in that it isn't listed in /proc/mounts. This
> inconsistency can confuse tools.
>
> This patch causes these subvolumes to become separate mounts by using
> the VFS' automount functionality, much like NFS uses automount when it
> discovered mountpoints on the server.
>
> The VFS currently makes it impossible to auto-mount a directory on to itself
> (i.e. a bind mount). For NFS this isn't a problem as a new superblock
> is created for the child filesystem so there are two separate dentries
> (and inodes) for the one directory: one in the parent filesystem, one in
> the child (note that the two superblocks share a common connection to
> the server so there is still a lot of commonality).
>
> BTRFS has chosen instead to use a single superblock for all subvolumes.

Naive question: was there a reason for that choice?

--b.

> This results in a single dentry for the subvol-root. A dentry which
> must be auto-mounted on itself.
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