> Basically, yes it is normal. > The question is which branch will a new file be created. And the answer > is it depends on which branch is writable, and which branch the parent > dir exists on. Well in my case all branches are writable, and the parent dir exists on all branches (it has to, because the dir is the 'root' of the union).
> In your case, the parent directory is /home/simon/.stuff.local or > /windows/C/Stuff and aufs decides to use the first one, > eg. /home/simon/.stuff.local. > This algorithm is effective, since the dentry (the first one) is given > to aufs by VFS and aufs is no need to lookup operation. What aufs does > is a simple copyup. Well, it may be effective, but IMHO it is far from optimal. Moving a file within 1 filesystem is an operation that costs nearly nothing usually, while moving a file across file systems can be very expensive as it has to actually move all the data, this becomes especially problematic with larger files. In addition, the creation of the whiteout instead of just deleting the file (why does it do this? its on a writeable branch, why white it out?) is wasting space, this again becomes more problematic with larger files. Now i know making rename/move more 'optimal' will probably make it quite a bit more complex to handle all the cases it needs to, but it may be something to think about or put on a todo list somewhere? By the way, i just tested unionfs, and it does keep a file on its own branch during a move/rename, at least when the targets parent dir exists on that branch, so it is possible to do this, it seems. This issue may be something to mention in the "Compatible/Incompatible with Unionfs" part of the manual too? Simon Sasburg ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV
