Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 25 Nov 2010 10:36:11 +0000 | From | Gordan Bobic <> | Subject | Re: VFS support for fast copy on deduplicating FSes |
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David Nicol wrote: > unresearched question/suggestion: > > Is there general support for a "fast copy" ioctl in the VFS layer, > which would be hooked by file systems that support COW or other forms > of deduplication and can provide copy semantics by manipulating > metadata only?
What would be nice to have is something that provides functionality like this: http://www.xmailserver.org/flcow.html
My use case is to do with chroot-type virtualization, to save DLL memory and disk space, but the author's use case is clearly different.
Vserver does something similar transparently within the combined guest-spaces (i.e. once you hashify the files, you no longer have 10 instances of the identical glibc for 10 guests, and they are no longer using 10x the RAM and disk space), and when the file is touched for writing it COWs a new copy.
It would be nice to have something like this exist on FS level without need for patching by the likes of vserver, by simply applying a flag to files we want to be COW-ed (chattr?).
Having this work across snapshots is potentially a bit dubious. I can see why it might be a bad idea, so perhaps a better way might be to have something that works semantically and syntactically similar to snapshots for duplicating directory subtrees into COW copies?
Gordan
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