[mythtv-users] Adding extra recorder disk space for Christmas !

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 12:01:44AM -0800, Brad Templeton wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 06:52:40AM +0000, Terry Barnaby wrote:
> > I didn't think that the overlay file system was supported yet with the
> > linux 2.6 kernels ?
> > If it is where can I get it ?
> 
> I would be curious too, I thought those projects were mostly on hold.
> 
> In QNX, another unix-inspired OS with a microkernel architecture,
> filesystems are inherently overlay, it's not a special filesystem.  In
> unix/linux, when you mount a filesystem at /mnt, whatever files were
> in /mnt at the time become invisible.   In QNX, they remain visible.
> 
> This seems to me the right behaviour, nothing special needed.  if you
> wanted to mount on an empty directory you can do that.

I'd say this depends on the write semantics.  As long as they're clear
it's less confusing.

But there is the "I'm transplanting this directory to a new partition
and mounting it in the same place" situation, wherein you'll have two
duplicate copies of everything, which can get a little messy...

Mostly, though, it's that people don't *expect* mounts to be
transparent.  Where, by people, I mean  "*nix admins".

> Indeed, we might see people using USB2 disks for Myth routinely if
> there were a way to allocate files to external disks down the road, as
> the way to build the video library instead of burning DVDs.

Indeed.  A little more semantics on that would be nice.

> You could for example, have a feature in myth to say you want to take
> a recording offline.  It stays in the database, but the file is moved
> to a removable medium (USB disk or DVD or CD-R).  You allow browse of
> the archived materials, and when you pick one it says, "Go get
> DVD #5" or "Get USB disk #2"

Yes!  This is precisely what we were wanting to do.  We were
considering writing a script that moved the file to a DVD, told you how
to label it, and then building a 10-second or so MPEG placeholder file
to plug into that slot on the drive--which told you the name of the
disc you'd archived it to.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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      If you can read this... thank a system adminstrator.  Or two.  --me