Bind mount is just... well... a bind mount. I.e. it's not a new mount. It just "links"/"exposes"/"considers" a subdirectory as a new mount point. As such it cannot alter the mount parameters. That's why you're getting complaints:
# mount /mnt/1/lala /mnt/2 -o bind,ro
mount: warning: /mnt/2 seems to be mounted read-write.
But as you said a normal bind mount works:
# mount /mnt/1/lala /mnt/2 -o bind
And then a ro remount also works:
# mount /mnt/1/lala /mnt/2 -o bind,remount,ro
However what happens is that you're changing the whole mount and not just this bind mount. If you take a look at /proc/mounts you'll see that both bind mount and the original mount change to read-only:
/dev/loop0 /mnt/1 ext2 ro,relatime,errors=continue,user_xattr,acl 0 0
/dev/loop0 /mnt/2 ext2 ro,relatime,errors=continue,user_xattr,acl 0 0
So what you're doing is like changing the initial mount to a read-only mount and then doing a bind mount which will of course be read-only.
UPDATE 2016-07-20:
The following are true for 4.5 kernels, but not true for 4.3 kernels (This is wrong. See update #2 below):
The kernel has two flags that control read-only:
- The
MS_READONLY
: Indicating whether the mount is read-only
- The
MNT_READONLY
: Indicating whether the "user" wants it read-only
On a 4.5 kernel, doing a mount -o bind,ro
will actually do the trick. For example, this:
# mkdir /tmp/test
# mkdir /tmp/test/a /tmp/test/b
# mount -t tmpfs none /tmp/test/a
# mkdir /tmp/test/a/d
# mount -o bind,ro /tmp/test/a/d /tmp/test/b
will create a read-only bind mount of /tmp/test/a/d
to /tmp/test/b
, which will be visible in /proc/mounts
as:
none /tmp/test/a tmpfs rw,relatime 0 0
none /tmp/test/b tmpfs ro,relatime 0 0
A more detailed view is visible in /proc/self/mountinfo
, which takes into consideration the user view (namespace). The relevant lines will be these:
363 74 0:49 / /tmp/test/a rw,relatime shared:273 - tmpfs none rw
368 74 0:49 /d /tmp/test/b ro,relatime shared:273 - tmpfs none rw
Where on the second line, you can see that it says both ro
(MNT_READONLY
) and rw
(!MS_READONLY
).
The end result is this:
# echo a > /tmp/test/a/d/f
# echo a > /tmp/test/b/f
-su: /tmp/test/b/f: Read-only file system
UPDATE 2016-07-20 #2:
A bit more digging into this shows that the behavior in fact depends on the version of libmount which is part of util-linux. Support for this was added with this commit and was released with version 2.27:
commit 9ac77b8a78452eab0612523d27fee52159f5016a
Author: Karel Zak
Date: Mon Aug 17 11:54:26 2015 +0200
libmount: add support for "bind,ro"
Now it's necessary t use two mount(8) calls to create a read-only
mount:
mount /foo /bar -o bind
mount /bar -o remount,ro,bind
This patch allows to specify "bind,ro" and the remount is done
automatically by libmount by additional mount(2) syscall. It's not
atomic of course.
Signed-off-by: Karel Zak
which also provides the workaround. The behavior can be seen using strace on an older and a newer mount:
Old:
mount("/tmp/test/a/d", "/tmp/test/b", 0x222e240, MS_MGC_VAL|MS_RDONLY|MS_BIND, NULL) = 0 <0.000681>
New:
mount("/tmp/test/a/d", "/tmp/test/b", 0x1a8ee90, MS_MGC_VAL|MS_RDONLY|MS_BIND, NULL) = 0 <0.011492>
mount("none", "/tmp/test/b", NULL, MS_RDONLY|MS_REMOUNT|MS_BIND, NULL) = 0 <0.006281>
Conclusion:
To achieve the desired result one needs to run two commands (as @Thomas already said):
mount SRC DST -o bind
mount DST -o remount,ro,bind
Newer versions of mount (util-linux >=2.27) do this automatically when one runs
mount SRC DST -o bind,ro
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.
Best Answer
You've misunderstood a little; the two mount points are equal in terms of permissions, flags, etc because the bind effectively redirects access from one path to another. But they are still distinct.
If you look at
/proc/self/mountinfo
you'll see the kernel view of the mount world for this process (namespaces make things more complicated; there's not just one view of the mount table).man 5 proc
will explain the format of this file, but you can see the tree hierarchy and where bind mounts have their "parent". This is the file thatfindmnt
parses.