shiftfs status and future development

[Serge E. Hallyn]

Quoting Seth Forshee (seth.forshee at canonical.com):
> 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).
> 
> 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?
> 
> 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?
> 
> Thanks,
> Seth
> 
> [1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1487638025.2337.49.camel@HansenPartnership.com

Hey Seth,

I haven't heard anything in a long time.  But if this is going to pick
back up, can we come up with a detailed set of goals and requirements?
I don't recall whether the last version still worked like this, but I'm
still not comfortable with the idea of a system where after a reboot,
container-created root-owned files are owned by host root until a path
is specially marked.  Enforcing that the "source" directory is itself
uid-shifted would greatly ease my mind.

-serge