I ran in to this issue when attempting to enforce group ACLs on a translucent proxy where all group information is stored on the proxied directory.
I implemented a hack in 2.3.43 (RHEL-5, we're a bit behind the times) to implement bi_entry_get_rw on slapo-translucent and rewire calls within the overlay from be_entry_get_rw to overlay_entry_get_ov. To prevent internal calls to be_entry_get_rw from invoking the new function (and potentially resulting in infinite recursion) I reworked the calls to overlay_entry_get_ov to use on->on_next instead of the top of the overlay stack. I believe that this was the original intent of these uses anyway to obtain the local-backend information so the call should start at the next overlay, or directly to the underlying database if there are no other overlays on the stack. I also applied a small patch to backover.c to support passing NULL to the on parameter of overlay_entry_get_ov and its release function to signify that the bottom of the overlay stack has been reached and to just call the backend database. When merging remote and local records the local records were duped and released immediately and the dupes appended to the returned entry and the caller left responsible to call entry_free.
I have not thoroughly tested this code and I will need to rewrite it for 2.4 anyway (when we move to it, hopefully later this year) but wanted to check if there has been any progress on this issue that would obviate my need to port this to 2.4. If not, aside from what I described above am I missing any glaring issues that I would need to address to get a complete solution to this issue?
Thanks, Aaron Reffett