ovl: document lower modification caveats

Some overlayfs optional features are incompatible with offline changes to
the lower tree and may result in -EXDEV, -EIO, or other errors.  Such
modification is not supported and the error behavior is intentionally not
specified.

Update the "Changes to underlying filesystems" section to note this
restriction.  Move the paragraph describing the offline behavior below the
online behavior so it is adjacent to the following 3 paragraphs describing
the NFS export offline modification behavior.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-unionfs/20200708142353.GA103536@redhat.com/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-unionfs/CAOQ4uxi23Zsmfb4rCed1n=On0NNA5KZD74jjjeyz+et32sk-gg@mail.gmail.com/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-unionfs/20200817135651.GA637139@redhat.com/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-unionfs/20200709153616.GE150543@redhat.com/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-unionfs/20200812135529.GA122370@kevinolos/
Signed-off-by: Kevin Locke <kevin@kevinlocke.name>
Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@redhat.com>

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/overlayfs.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/overlayfs.rst
index 1ef4ef38b542a8250da95838610ae4973851c5fd..b86be7c6a9529190060e5282b42a047a758c7a60 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/overlayfs.rst
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/overlayfs.rst
@@ -469,14 +469,18 @@ summarized in the `Inode properties`_ table above.
 Changes to underlying filesystems
 ---------------------------------
 
-Offline changes, when the overlay is not mounted, are allowed to either
-the upper or the lower trees.
-
 Changes to the underlying filesystems while part of a mounted overlay
 filesystem are not allowed.  If the underlying filesystem is changed,
 the behavior of the overlay is undefined, though it will not result in
 a crash or deadlock.
 
+Offline changes, when the overlay is not mounted, are allowed to the
+upper tree.  Offline changes to the lower tree are only allowed if the
+"metadata only copy up", "inode index", and "redirect_dir" features
+have not been used.  If the lower tree is modified and any of these
+features has been used, the behavior of the overlay is undefined,
+though it will not result in a crash or deadlock.
+
 When the overlay NFS export feature is enabled, overlay filesystems
 behavior on offline changes of the underlying lower layer is different
 than the behavior when NFS export is disabled.