a featureful union filesystem https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/
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Antonio S. Musumeci ea47934c63 Fix idle pool stall when shrinking via _remove_count
_remove_thread_scaling_locked increments _remove_count to signal a
worker to self-exit, but this counter is only checked after a worker
completes a real task.  Workers blocked on wait_dequeue (standard loop)
or try_wait_dequeue_for (autoscale loop) never see the removal request,
so shrinking an idle pool via remove_thread() or set_threads() stalls
indefinitely.

Fix: enqueue a wakeup poison pill alongside each _remove_count
increment so a blocked worker is guaranteed to wake up.

To prevent double-removal (one worker exits via the task-completion CAS
loop consuming _remove_count, another exits via the wakeup pill), the
poison pill handler now attempts to consume a _remove_count before
self-removing.  If the count is already zero (claimed by a worker that
finished a real task), the pill is treated as stale and the worker
continues processing.

Shutdown path is unaffected: the destructor sets _stop before enqueueing
its own pills, and the pill handler checks _stop first, returning BREAK
unconditionally during shutdown regardless of _remove_count.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-04-10 12:39:30 -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 idle pool stall when shrinking via _remove_count 2026-04-10 12:39:30 -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.