• Alexander Larsson's avatar
    ovl: Support escaped overlay.* xattrs · dad02fad
    Alexander Larsson authored
    There are cases where you want to use an overlayfs mount as a lowerdir
    for another overlayfs mount. For example, if the system rootfs is on
    overlayfs due to composefs, or to make it volatile (via tmps), then
    you cannot currently store a lowerdir on the rootfs. This means you
    can't e.g. store on the rootfs a prepared container image for use
    using overlayfs.
    
    To work around this, we introduce an escapment mechanism for overlayfs
    xattrs. Whenever the lower/upper dir has a xattr named
    "overlay.overlay.XYZ", we list it as "overlay.XYZ" in listxattrs, and
    when the user calls getxattr or setxattr on "overlay.XYZ", we apply to
    "overlay.overlay.XYZ" in the backing directories.
    
    This allows storing any kind of overlay xattrs in a overlayfs mount
    that can be used as a lowerdir in another mount. It is possible to
    stack this mechanism multiple times, such that
    "overlay.overlay.overlay.XYZ" will survive two levels of overlay mounts,
    however this is not all that useful in practice because of stack depth
    limitations of overlayfs mounts.
    
    Note: These escaped xattrs are copied to upper during copy-up.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAlexander Larsson <alexl@redhat.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarAmir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAmir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
    dad02fad
overlayfs.h 28.6 KB