* **dropcacheonclose**: when a file is requested to be closed call `posix_fadvise` on it first to instruct the kernel that we no longer need the data and it can drop its cache. Recommended when **direct_io** is not enabled to limit double caching. (default: false)
* **symlinkify**: when enabled (set to **true**) and a file is not writable and its mtime or ctime is older than **symlinkify_timeout** files will be reported as symlinks to the original files. Please read more below before using. (default: false)
* **symlinkify_timeout**: time to wait, in seconds, to activate the **symlinkify** behavior. (default: 3600)
* **nullrw**: turns reads and writes into no-ops. The request will succeed but do nothing. Useful for benchmarking mergerfs. (default: false)
* **fsname**: sets the name of the filesystem as seen in **mount**, **df**, etc. Defaults to a list of the source paths concatenated together with the longest common prefix removed.
* **func.<func>=<policy>**: sets the specific FUSE function's policy. See below for the list of value types. Example: **func.getattr=newest**
* **category.<category>=<policy>**: Sets policy of all FUSE functions in the provided category. Example: **category.create=mfs**
@ -77,6 +78,37 @@ Due to the levels of indirection introduced by mergerfs and the underlying techn
**WARNING:** Some backup solutions, such as CrashPlan, do not backup the target of a symlink. If using this feature it will be necessary to point any backup software to the original drives or configure the software to follow symlinks if such an option is available. Alternatively create two mounts. One for backup and one for general consumption.
### nullrw
Due to how FUSE works there is an overhead to all requests made to a FUSE filesystem. Meaning that even a simple passthrough will have some slowdown. However, generally the overhead is minimal in comparison to the cost of the underlying I/O. By disabling the underlying I/O we can test the theoretical performance boundries.
By enabling `nullrw` mergerfs will work as it always does **except** that all reads and writes will be no-ops. A write will succeed (the size of the write will be returned as if it were successful) but mergerfs does nothing with the data it was given. Similarly a read will return the size requested but won't touch the buffer.
It's important to test with different `obs` (output block size) values since the relative overhead is greater with smaller values. As you can see above the size of a read or write can massively impact theoretical performance. If an application performs much worse through mergerfs it could very well be that it doesn't optimally size its read and write requests.
# FUNCTIONS / POLICIES / CATEGORIES
The POSIX filesystem API has a number of functions. **creat**, **stat**, **chown**, etc. In mergerfs these functions are grouped into 3 categories: **action**, **create**, and **search**. Functions and categories can be assigned a policy which dictates how **mergerfs** behaves. Any policy can be assigned to a function or category though some may not be very useful in practice. For instance: **rand** (random) may be useful for file creation (create) but could lead to very odd behavior if used for `chmod` (though only if there were more than one copy of the file).
Antonio SJ Musumeci
8 years ago