How To Install overlayfs-tools on Fedora 36
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install overlayfs-tools on Fedora 36.
What is overlayfs-tools
OverlayFS is the union filesystem provided by Linux kernel. This program comes provides three tools * vacuum - remove duplicated files in upperdir where copy_up is done but the file is not actually modified (see the sentence “the copy_up may turn out to be unnecessary” in the Linux documentation). This may reduce the size of upperdir without changing lowerdir or overlay. * diff - show the list of actually changed files (the difference between overlay and lowerdir). A file with its type changed (i.e. from symbolic link to regular file) will shown as deleted then added, rather than modified. Similarly, for a opaque directory in upperdir, the corresponding directory in lowerdir (if exists) will be shown as entirely deleted, and a new directory with the same name added. File permission/owner changes will be simply shown as modified. * merge - merge down the changes from upperdir to lowerdir. Unlike aubrsync for AuFS which bypasses the union filesystem mechanism, overlayfs-utils emulates the OverlayFS logic, which will be far more efficient. After this operation, upperdir will be empty and lowerdir will be the same as original overlay. * deref - copy changes from upperdir to uppernew while unfolding redirect directories and metacopy regular files, so that new upperdir is compatible with legacy overlayfs driver. For safety reasons, vacuum and merge will not actually modify the filesystem, but generate a shell script to do the changes instead.
We can use yum or dnf to install overlayfs-tools on Fedora 36. In this tutorial we discuss both methods but you only need to choose one of method to install overlayfs-tools.
Install overlayfs-tools on Fedora 36 Using dnf
Update yum database with dnf using the following command.
sudo dnf makecache --refresh
After updating yum database, We can install overlayfs-tools using dnf by running the following command:
sudo dnf -y install overlayfs-tools
Install overlayfs-tools on Fedora 36 Using yum
Update yum database with yum using the following command.
sudo yum makecache --refresh
After updating yum database, We can install overlayfs-tools using yum by running the following command:
sudo yum -y install overlayfs-tools
How To Uninstall overlayfs-tools on Fedora 36
To uninstall only the overlayfs-tools package we can use the following command:
sudo dnf remove overlayfs-tools
overlayfs-tools Package Contents on Fedora 36
/usr/bin/overlay
/usr/lib/.build-id
/usr/lib/.build-id/2c
/usr/lib/.build-id/2c/41e4558790138d76e819d16a3243150df0fd6e
/usr/share/doc/overlayfs-tools
/usr/share/doc/overlayfs-tools/README.md
/usr/share/licenses/overlayfs-tools
/usr/share/licenses/overlayfs-tools/LICENSE.txt
/usr/share/man/man1/overlay.1.gz
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install overlayfs-tools on Fedora 36 using yum and [dnf]((/fedora/36/dnf/).
