Re: shiftfs status and future development

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Thu, 2018-06-14 at 13:44 -0500, Seth Forshee wrote:
> I wanted to inquire about the current status of shiftfs and the plans
> for it moving forward. We'd like to have this functionality available
> for use in lxd, and I'm interesetd in helping with development (or
> picking up development if it's stalled).

Well, I'm still using it and technically still developing it; it's just
that its self contained and there haven't been any interface changes
necessitating an update that I've noticed, so the last published patch
still applies (well, unless my git rebasing quietly changed something
and I didn't notice).

> To start, is anyone still working on shiftfs or similar
> functionality? I haven't found it in any git tree on kernel.org, and
> as far as mailing list activity the last submission I can find is
> [1]. Is there anything newer than this?

I'm working on it, but it mostly works for my use case.

> Based on past mailing list discussions, it seems like there was still
> debate as to whether this feature should be an overlay filesystem or
> something supported at the vfs level. Was this ever resolved?

I think that's the main problem: I don't really have anything
actionable to work on for upstreaming.  I suspect growing more
consumers would help with this.

James