Re: Overlay writable filesystem over r/o partition

Lance S. Nehring (lnehrin@uswest.com)
Thu, 08 Jan 1998 07:32:23 -0700


Please pardon my memory lapse, but wasn't there an overlay filesystem
available back before (or about) release kernel
release 1.0.0?? I don't remember what it was called, but it was
supposed to let a person take a cdrom with uncompressed
source trees (e.g. X11 or Linux kernel) , and mount an overlay
filesystem on top of the cdrom for the purpose of
performing builds. From what I remember, the overlay filesystem was
transparent for reads unless there had been a write
to a file. In which case the file was stored in the overlay and used
for any subsequent reads.

The overlay filesystem is a very useful concept and I'd like to
encourage it's development and inclusion into the Linux
source.