>> Is the upper layer a 4.4 filesystem?
>> 4.2 & 4.3 filesystems do not support whiteouts, which unionfs needs.
> What I don't understand is, why does the upper layer *need* to
> support whiteouts in order to be mounted rw?  If it doesn't you can't
> create whiteouts, fine, but you can still alter files in the lower
> layer or write new ones.

But not remove files which exist in the lower layer.  I know _I_ would
be rather surprised to find I could overwrite a file, create new files
to my heart's content, but be unable to remove some files.

I was rather astonished to discover that the unionfs (mis)behaved this
way, demanding whiteout support.  IMO it should keep metadata files
instead, the way Sun's tfs does.  I have a user-level implementation of
such a filesystem, but it looks to the kernel like an NFS mount, and
lots of things simply don't work over NFS.  I tried to do a build of
the world on it and I got just too much brokenness.  Once NFS really
works I'll probably try again.

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu