How does the absense of a read-only file-system affect the ability to have a union-mount only 'visible' for a specific user or user-process? Or is this read-only thing necessary to solve another problem? Essential for the union-mount solution to work, is that it can at least be *only* visible/available for a given (user) process. Otherwise your system is less different from a progressive system. Still in that case, the union-mount solution might have some advantages, like simple repair, and a backup procedure (unmount the union-mount, or restart the machine -- assuming you didn't add the union-mount to fstab).
On 16-12-2005 22:02:40 +0100, Dirk Schnberger wrote: > Hi, > > again some results from the unionfs theory. > Seems the real problem is not the unionfs, which seems to work, but instead > the problem to actually mount an existing file system as read-only. > For Mac OSX seems to work only the was to eiter direct mount from CD, or to > mount a disk image (.dmg). > > The missing link seems to be a "Null file system" (nullfs), which allows to > mount a folder into another folder. Nullfs seem to exist on other systems, > like FreeBSD, but not on Darwin (or at least it is not build and deployed). > > There seem to be some ideas in regards to being able to use a nullfs as a > Darwin kernel extension (.kext), but these ideas don't seem to be finished / > buggy. > > Sorry, doesn't seem to work that way. > Regards > Dirk > -- Fabian Groffen Gentoo for Mac OS X Project -- Interim Lead -- [email protected] mailing list
