tail emits warning: unrecognized file system type

Symptom

tail when used on v6.5+ platforms will successfully open a file, but elicit a warning similar to:

tail: unrecognized file system type 0x794c7630 for ‘error_log’. please report this to bug-coreutils@gnu.org. reverting to polling

Cause

Older versions of tail, such as shipped with RHEL7.2, do not ship with a version of coreutils that properly detects the magic number for OverlayFS.

Solution

Ignore it. This is pending on an upstream vendor patch in coreutils, which patched already.

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