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KSP fails to launch from an overlayfs mount


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I have a working (writeable) overlayfs setup and a clean KSP installation mounted as lower directory. The upper directory only contains an empty GameData dir and will receive all changes that are written to the merged dir. When I launch KSP I get the following error:

% ./KSP.x86_64 Set current directory to /var/games/ksp/merged
Found path: /var/games/ksp/merged/KSP.x86_64
There is no data folder

Which leads me to believe that KSP relies on something that overlayfs doesn't provide and as such ignores the upper overlay dir. From the overlayfs documentation:

[...] An overlay-filesystem tries to present afilesystem
which is the result over overlaying one filesystem on top
of the other.


The result will inevitably fail to look exactly like a normal
filesystem for various technical reasons. The expectation is that
many use cases will be able to ignore these differences.

This approach is 'hybrid' because the objects that appear in the
filesystem do not all appear to belong to that filesystem. In many
cases an object accessed in the union will be indistinguishable
from accessing the corresponding object from the original filesystem.
This is most obvious from the 'st_dev' field returned by stat(2).

While directories will report an st_dev from the overlay-filesystem,
all non-directory objects will report an st_dev from the lower or
upper filesystem that is providing the object. Similarly st_ino will
only be unique when combined with st_dev, and both of these can change
over the lifetime of a non-directory object. Many applications and
tools ignore these values and will not be affected.

I am posting here with the hope of getting this setup working as overlays are really valuable in unifying content from different sources (clean ksp from steam + mods with CKAN + customizations to mods) while keeping them completely separate. Overlayfs has been recently added to the mainline linux kernel and with 3.19 it will be possible to overlay multiple directories over each other for even more flexibility.

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