bind mounting and df output

Question

I have a partition, /dev/sdb1, that gets mounted at /data. In /etc/fstab I have:

/dev/sdb1           /data           ext4  defaults  1 2

After that partition gets mounted, I then have the following bind mounts:

/data/backups/f17/opt   /opt            none  rw,bind   0 0
/data/backups/f17/home  /home           none  rw,bind   0 0
/data/var/www/html      /var/www/html/  none  rw,bind   0 0

All the mounting is done just fine.

The problem is that when I run df, the only entry I get relating to sdb1 points to "/opt", not "/data".

e.g.:

/dev/sdb1   240233144 196081648 31925236 86% /opt

I expect/want df to show the original mount point, that is /data, instead of /opt. Or at the very least, show all the mount points related to sdb1. If I umount the /opt bind mount point, then df happily shows /data (even though the other two bind mounts are still mounted, strangely).

There is no difference in behavior if I do the mounting commands in the terminal (vs letting the system do it via mount -a, which uses /etc/fstab).

I know I can use something like findmnt --df to get a better picture of all mounted filesystems, but I want to use df (and I don't want to alias df to anything else).

• Fedora 21
• kernel 3.19.3-200.fc21.x86_64
• df (GNU coreutils) 8.22
• mount from util-linux 2.25.2

thanks.

UPDATE
(adding more information)

The file /proc/mounts shows all four mount points:

/dev/sdb1 /data ext4 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /var/www/html ext4 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /home ext4 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /opt ext4 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 0

Solution

A bind mount is equivalent to the original. There isn't one that's marked as the original and one that's marked as a copy. Bind mounts are like hard links in this respect, not like symbolic links.

Since GNU coreutils 8.21 (if I read the changelog correctly), df strives to report each filesystem only once. Older versions included one entry per non-ignored mount point, so a bind mount would result in multiple entries. df shows the latest mount point for each filesystem, as far as it can determine. In your case, df reports /opt, not /data, because /opt was added last.

Pass the option -a to get even recent coreutils to report all entries for each filesystem. This also causes filesystems that would normally be ignored to be listed, if you don't pass a path argument. If you do pass a path argument, I think df never reports anything but the latest mount point.

If you don't want to alias df to something else, you'll either have to replace df by a custom implementation or have to live with df reporting something different from what you'd like. If you need the earliest mount point rather than the latest one, a sane solution would be to call df -a and retain only the first match for the device that you're interested in.

Comments

[wurtel]

Perhaps it shows the shortest mountpoint? What are the contents of /proc/mounts and /etc/mtab (if the latter is not a symlink to the latter)?

[atreyu]

/etc/mtab is a link to /proc/self/mounts. /proc/mounts shows all 4 entries, will add to post.

[atreyu]

Thanks, Gilles, df -a will suffice.