I got unionfs running on a slightly different environment. I modified the firmware of my Motorola A780 phone (runs linux) to use unionfs with a TransFlash 256MB card serving as the writable filesystem. Now the phone is completely customizable.
However, unionfs has a strange impact on performance. If I mount (and pivot_root) the unionfs before the phone's internal applicaions are loaded, these applications become sluggish. It would be understandable if they were sluggish for the first few seconds, until the inodes are cached and everything is in memory. However, some of them remain sluggish even after a long time of use. Curiously, if I mount the same unionfs at a later stage, after these applications are running, they run fine (although the files they need to open at a later stage are now in unionfs. I don't understand why unionfs would have that effect, especially on some applications that don't open any new file that resides on the unionfs throughout their lifecycle. Shouldn't the relevant inodes be in cache after a short while, thus canceling any performance impact of unionfs on applications that don't open new files from the unionfs mountpoint ? Anyone has a guess on why the reduced performance continues throughout the lifecycle of the application if it has been executed from unionfs, but not if unionfs was mounted after the exec ? In general, did anyone try unionfs in a resource-constrained environment and could share some performance tips ? Any easy way to reduce memory consumption of unionfs ? _______________________________________________ unionfs mailing list [email protected] http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/mailman/listinfo/unionfs
