OverlayFS Finally Offered For Pulling Into Linux 3.18

When Linux 3.18-rc1 was released last week, one week sooner than anticipated, Linus Torvalds mentioned he was willing to still allow OverlayFS to be merged this cycle. One week later, that code is hopefully now ready for merging.

While Linux 3.18-rc2 is expected for release later today, last night Al Viro sent in a new VFS pull request that finally has OverlayFS ready for landing. OverlayFS has been aiming for Linux 3.18 and it's finally moving ahead while already having a lot of users even though it's not been part of the mainline kernel tree. OverlayFS is a simple union file-system already used by some live DVD/USB Linux distributions like Mageia and OpenWRT. OverlayFS has been trying for years to get mainlined in the Linux kernel but not all kernel developers have been happy with it -- some objecting it's incomplete, not happy with the design, etc.

With this pull request hopefully it will be honored by Torvalds today and let OverlayFS make it into Linux 3.18 this late. Anyhow, there's already a lot of other great features to Linux 3.18.