Inode non-uniqueness is a hell of a problem to debug: it's not necessarily a problem most of the time then you'll run into a corner case where something depends

Inode non-uniqueness is a hell of a problem to debug: it's not necessarily a problem most of the time then you'll run into a corner case where something depends on it. e.g. we had a big issue with this back around 2008 where we accidentally had two AFS volumes with overlapping inode ranges (AFS was represented as a single device, even if there were multiple volumes mounted). Linux's dynamic linker had an optimization that cached device/inode for DSOs that had already been loaded, and wouldn't attempt to load them again. If you had a binary that depended on linking two DSOs from different volumes that had different names, but the same inode number, the first one would get linked OK but the linker would then ignore the second one and you'd get missing dynamic linker dependencies out of nowhere. This was the first and hopefully last time reading the source to ld.so during a production outage.