a featureful union filesystem https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/
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Antonio S. Musumeci 5f50f76b66 fix idle self-exit allowing pool to drain to 0 threads
_remove_thread_scaling_locked floors min_allowed at 1, preventing
remove_thread/set_threads from ever reducing the pool below 1 thread.
But start_routine_autoscale passed raw _scaling_config.min_threads
to _try_remove_self_if_above without the same floor.  With
min_threads == 0, all idle workers could self-exit, draining the
pool to zero threads and permanently stalling any work enqueued
via non-autoscale enqueue_work (which doesn't call
_maybe_grow_on_pressure).

Apply the same max(min_threads, 1) floor in start_routine_autoscale
to keep the two shrink paths consistent.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-04-10 22:18:23 -04:00
.github Update submitting bug reports, improve collect-info (#1598) 2025-12-06 13:55:14 -06:00
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debian Build improvements (#1501) 2025-08-04 23:39:52 -05:00
man Fix manpage links for 2.41.0-rc3 (#1555) 2025-10-29 12:07:49 -05:00
mkdocs Update docs on limiting drive spinup 2026-04-06 14:01:20 -05:00
src Misc updates and fixes 2026-04-04 02:46:24 -05:00
tests thread_pool: store scaling config by value 2026-04-10 16:23:08 -04:00
tools tools/preload: include correct extended attribute headers on FreeBSD (#1590) 2025-11-25 12:09:41 -06:00
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mergerfs - a featureful union filesystem

mergerfs is a FUSE based union filesystem geared towards simplifying storage and management of files across numerous commodity storage devices. It is similar to mhddfs, unionfs, aufs, DrivePool, etc.

Features

  • Logically combine numerous filesystems/paths into a single mount point (JBOFS: Just a Bunch of FileSystems)
  • Combine paths of the same or different filesystems
  • Ability to add or remove filesystems/paths without impacting the rest of the data
  • Unaffected by individual filesystem failure
  • Configurable file selection and creation placement
  • File IO passthrough for near native IO performance (where supported)
  • Works with filesystems of any size
  • Works with filesystems of almost any type
  • Ignore read-only filesystems when creating files
  • Hard links
  • Hard link copy-on-write / CoW
  • Runtime configurable
  • Support for extended attributes (xattrs)
  • Support for file attributes (chattr)
  • Support for POSIX ACLs

Non-features

  • Read/write overlay on top of read-only filesystem like OverlayFS
  • File whiteout
  • RAID like parity calculation (see SnapRAID)
  • Redundancy
  • Splitting of files across branches

How it works

mergerfs logically merges multiple filesystem paths together. Not block devices, not filesystem mounts, just paths. It acts as a proxy to the underlying filesystem paths. Combining the behaviors of some functions and being a selector for others.

When the contents of a directory are requested mergerfs combines the list of files from each directory, deduplicating entries, and returns that list.

When a file or directory is created a policy is first run to determine which branch will be selected for the creation.

For functions which change attributes or remove the file the behavior may be applied to all instances found.

The way in which mergerfs behaves is controlled by the config/options/settings. More specifically by policies.

Visualization

A         +      B        =       C
/disk1           /disk2           /merged
|                |                |
+-- /dir1        +-- /dir1        +-- /dir1
|   |            |   |            |   |
|   +-- file1    |   |            |   +-- file1
|                |   +-- file2    |   +-- file2
|                |   +-- file3    |   +-- file3
|                |                |
+-- /dir2        |                +-- /dir2
|   |            |                |   |
|   +-- file4    |                |   +-- file4
|                |                |
|                +-- /dir3        +-- /dir3
|                |   |            |   |
|                |   +-- file5    |   +-- file5
|                |                |
+-- file6        |                +-- file6
+-- file7        +-- file7        +-- file7

QuickStart

https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/latest/quickstart/

Documentation

https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs

Support

https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/latest/support/

Sponsorship and Donations

https://github.com/trapexit/support

Development and support of a project like mergerfs requires a significant amount of time and effort. The software is released under the very liberal ISC license and is therefore free to use for personal or commercial uses.

If you are a non-commercial user and find mergerfs and its support valuable and would like to support the project financially it would be very much appreciated.

If you are using mergerfs commercially please consider sponsoring the project to ensure it continues to be maintained and receive updates. If custom features are needed feel free to contact me directly.