Yrurtj

Is it possible to union-mount an existing disk image containing a root filesystem to the upperdir of an overlayfs mount for read-write access?

I'm trying to union-mount some old disk images to a /tmp/ directory on an Ubuntu 16.04 machine using pre-existing scripts (originally written on Ubuntu 12.04 and ported to 14.04).

The old automation scripts used overlayfs to create and union-mount writable ext2/3 disk images on top of squashfs images — something like this:

cd /tmp

mkdir lower upper union

losetup /dev/loop1 /tmp/image.sfs

losetup /dev/loop2 /tmp/image.ext2

mount -t squashfs -o ro /dev/loop1 /tmp/lower

mount -t ext2 -o rw /dev/loop2 /tmp/upper

mount -t overlayfs -o rw,lowerdir=/tmp/lower,upperdir=/tmp/upper overlayfs /tmp/union

They were last used on an 3.x kernel (likely pre-3.18), and that method doesn't seem to work anymore. Overlay now requires a workdir option—e.g.:

mount -t overlay -o rw,lowerdir=/tmp/lower,upperdir=/tmp/upper,workdir=/tmp/work overlay /tmp/union

Q: Is it possible to tweak the automation scripts to mount and use the existing images in a writable state on a 4.x kernel? Can I avoid reformulating them to contain something like root and work directories? In some cases that may break their use elsewhere.

Per the documentation, the workdir has to be an empty directory on the same filesystem as the upperdir to allow for atomic writes. That sounds to me like it is impossible to union-mount root filesystem images as read-write. The workdir would have to exist within the images (separate from their data directory) which isn't possible in a root filesystem image.

I've considered loading up stock Ubuntu 14.04 in a VM for a couple one-offs, but it's not a long term solution.

Best Attempt So Far:

The only solution I've come up with that avoids double-writing the same data to disk is to mount both images as lowerdir values, with upperdir and workdir directories sitting on a tmpfs mount. Then I can use rsync to copy the changes from the tmpfs location to the mounted ext2/3 image after the automated writes are complete and the overlay union has been unmounted—i.e.:

mount -t overlay -o rw,lowerdir=/tmp/upper:/tmp/lower,upperdir=/tmp/tmpfs/root,workdir=/tmp/tmpfs/work overlay /tmp/union



...perform automated reads/writes...



umount /tmp/union



...rsync contents from /tmp/tmpfs/root to /tmp/upper...

It's strictly limited to available RAM, though, and it's an ugly hack to add to all of the automation scripts.

Create an additional level of nesting in the image file:

mkdir   /tmp/upper/upper

mkdir   /tmp/upper/work

mount -t overlay -o rw,lowerdir=/tmp/lower,upperdir=/tmp/upper/upper,workdir=/tmp/upper/work overlay /tmp/union