"This feature allows a read-only view into a read-write filesystem. In the process of doing that, it also provides infrastructure for keeping track of the number of writers to any given mount," Dave Hansen began, describing his "read-only bind mounts" patches. He continued, "this has a number of uses. It allows chroots to have parts of filesystems writable. It will be useful for containers in the future because users may have root inside a container, but should not be allowed to write to some filesystems. This also replaces patches that vserver has had out of the tree for several years. It allows security enhancements by making sure that parts of your filesystem [are] read-only (such as when you don't trust your FTP server), when you don't want to have entire new filesystems mounted, or when you want atime selectively updated."

Christoph Hellwig was interested in seeing the patches get some more testing, "I still think we really want this in -mm. As we've seen at the kernel summit there's a pretty desperate need for it." Andrew Morton noted that the "unprivileged mounts" code was working in the same area, but described that work as "a bit stuck." He suggested, "it sounds like a better approach would be for me to merge the r/o bind mounts code and to drop (or maybe rework) the unprivileged mounts patches." Dave explained that they don't collide much, to which Andrew's reply suggested that the read-only mount patches would be merged into the -mm kernel soon.

Dave Hansen announced a new kernel tree focused on the development of support for hot-pluggable memory in the Linux kernel. The latest patchset is 2.6.9-rc1-mm1-mhp1, about which Dave explains:

"The main aim of this patch set (other than having the longest possible version name) is to give the memory hotplug developers a common base to work from. It is hopefully split up in such a way that it is easy to replace an implementation in the middle of the stack without disturbing too much other stuff."

Future discussion of and this tree will be found on the lhms-devel mailing list, part of the lhms project. The latest patches are against Andrew Morton [interview]'s -mm tree [story].