Bug 201038 – Replacement for unionfs by aufs in genkernel

• Product: Gentoo Hosted Projects
• Status: RESOLVED LATER

[Description Michael Zanetta 2007-12-03 00:03:55 UTC]

Hi,

Since unionfs seems a bit buggy and needs kernel patching every new version, i started looking at aufs which seems more stable, faster and better backward compatible.

I've made a patch against genkernel-3.4.9_pre10 replacing unionfs by aufs.

So far, i found it very stable though it's only available on CVS... I ran tests on 2.6.22 kernel.

Attached is the patch along with the version tested. Hope you'll find it useful

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

[Comment 1 Michael Zanetta 2007-12-03 00:04:52 UTC]

Created attachment 137578 [details, diff]
genkernel-3.4.9_pre10-aufs.patch

Adds support for aufs

[Comment 2 Michael Zanetta 2007-12-03 00:06:47 UTC]

Created attachment 137580 [details]
aufs-20071126.tar.bz2

The snapshot from aufs on 11/26 2007

[Comment 3 Andrew Gaffney (RETIRED) 2007-12-03 02:33:58 UTC]

I looked into this not too long ago. However, I really have no desire to include something in genkernel that hasn't even had an actual release. Also, unionfs is heading in the direction of being included in the kernel proper. It's been on the mm branch (iirc) for ~10 months already.

[Comment 4 Michael Zanetta 2007-12-03 18:07:05 UTC]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I looked into this not too long ago. However, I really have no desire to
> include something in genkernel that hasn't even had an actual release. Also,
> unionfs is heading in the direction of being included in the kernel proper.
> It's been on the mm branch (iirc) for ~10 months already.
> 

I can understand that but since current genkernel implementation doesn't work with the beloved gentoo-sources, I thought that aufs was a nice replacement.
So I think I can strip the module compilation part and patch the kernel by hand to have a working unionfs until it's included in gentoo-sources.

[Comment 5 Andrew Gaffney (RETIRED) 2007-12-23 21:21:49 UTC]

Maybe we'll consider inclusion once aufs has had a proper release.

[Comment 6 Andrew Gaffney (RETIRED) 2007-12-23 21:29:43 UTC]

Looking again, aufs requires a random smattering of kernel patches depending on certain circumstances such as kernel version and various features that you have enabled. This is definitely not going in unless it can be compiled against a vanilla kernel or it's includes upstream.