a featureful union filesystem https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/
Find a file
Antonio S. Musumeci c0b4ea3fae Fix destructor race with _remove_self during shutdown
The destructor and autoscale idle-exit path could race: a worker
calling _remove_self would erase itself from _threads and detach
while the destructor was iterating _threads to enqueue poison pills
and join. This could cause too few poison pills (deadlocking
remaining workers) or pthread_join on a detached thread (UB).

Two changes:
- _remove_self now checks _stop and returns immediately during
  shutdown, ensuring no thread detaches after destruction begins.
- Destructor snapshots _threads under the mutex before enqueueing
  poison pills and joining, so it operates on a stable copy.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-04-09 19:35:35 -04:00
.github Update submitting bug reports, improve collect-info (#1598) 2025-12-06 13:55:14 -06:00
buildtools Detect OS for release-sample make target 2026-04-08 20:48:02 -05:00
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 Add support for FUSE_COPY_FILE_RANGE_64 2026-04-01 23:20:05 -05:00
tools tools/preload: include correct extended attribute headers on FreeBSD (#1590) 2025-11-25 12:09:41 -06:00
vendored Fix destructor race with _remove_self during shutdown 2026-04-09 19:35:35 -04:00
.gitignore Build improvements (#1501) 2025-08-04 23:39:52 -05:00
DEPENDENCIES Update vendored/nonstd to latest and fix API usage 2026-03-02 01:09:16 -05:00
LICENSE Update copyright headers 2026-03-02 01:09:16 -05:00
Makefile Detect OS for release-sample make target 2026-04-08 20:48:02 -05:00
mergerfs.spec Build improvements (#1501) 2025-08-04 23:39:52 -05:00
README.md Fix some links in docs (#1582) 2025-11-18 08:35:27 -06:00

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.