*BSD News Article 50418


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From: bs@Germany.EU.net (Bernard Steiner)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: unionfs usage without "option UNION"
Date: 31 Aug 1995 11:16:43 +0200
Organization: EUnet Deutschland GmbH, Dortmund, Germany
Lines: 20
Message-ID: <423ulr$87@Germany.EU.net>
References: <DE3uo1.1Cr@reptiles.org> <87but778nq.fsf@interbev.mindspring.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: qwerty.germany.eu.net


In article <87but778nq.fsf@interbev.mindspring.com>, Robert Sanders <rsanders@mindspring.com> writes:
|> On Wed, 30 Aug 1995 03:50:24 GMT, jim@reptiles.org (Jim Mercer) said:
|> > i would assume that union fs's should not work at all if not defined.
|> > but they kinda do.
|> 
|> mount may be loading the appropriate LKM (loadable kernel module) on
|> demand.  Either way, unionfs is known to be broken at this time.

With 2.0R, I used to use unionfs quite a lot. The snag was that the LKM did
not work; you had to compile the kernel with options UNION. Even then,
some stuff seemed to hang occasionally (I used to mount a writeable directory
on top of CDROMs), but simply telling the system to "umount /cdrom" always
cleared the error condition, i.e. the umount command failed miserably telling
me /cdrom was still active, but the other process didn't hand and chugged
along...

No, I don't have any idea what was going on or why LKM unionfs didn't work.

Bernard