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From: VDA <VDA@port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua>
To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: COW fs (Re: Editing-in-place of a large file)
Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2001 00:28:18 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <318476047.20010903002818@port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20010902152137.L23180@draal.physics.wisc.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20010902152137.L23180@draal.physics.wisc.edu>

Sunday, September 02, 2001, 11:21:37 PM, Bob McElrath wrote:
BM> I would like to take an extremely large file (multi-gigabyte) and edit
BM> it by removing a chunk out of the middle.  This is easy enough by
BM> reading in the entire file and spitting it back out again, but it's
BM> hardly efficent to read in an 8GB file just to remove a 100MB segment.

BM> Is there another way to do this?

BM> Is it possible to modify the inode structure of the underlying
BM> filesystem to free blocks in the middle?  (What to do with the half-full
BM> blocks that are left?)  Has anyone written a tool to do something like
BM> this?

BM> Is there a way to do this in a filesystem-independent manner?

A COW fs is a far more useful and cool. A fs where a copy of a file
does not duplicate all blocks. Blocks get copied-on-write only when
copy of a file is written to. There could be even a fs compressor
which looks for and merges blocks with exactly same contents from
different files.

Maybe ext2/3 folks will play with this idea after ext3?

I'm planning to write a test program which will scan my ext2 fs and
report how many duplicate blocks with the same contents it sees (i.e
how many would I save with a COW fs)
-- 
Best regards,
VDA
mailto:VDA@port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua
http://port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua/vda/



  reply	other threads:[~2001-09-02 21:29 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 29+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2001-09-02 20:21 Editing-in-place of a large file Bob McElrath
2001-09-02 21:28 ` VDA [this message]
2001-09-09 14:46   ` COW fs (Re: Editing-in-place of a large file) John Ripley
2001-09-09 16:30     ` John Ripley
2001-09-10  2:43       ` Daniel Phillips
2001-09-10  2:58         ` David Lang
2001-09-09 17:41     ` Xavier Bestel
2001-09-10  1:29       ` John Ripley
2001-09-10  6:45         ` Ragnar Kjørstad
2001-09-14 10:06         ` Pavel Machek
2001-09-10 11:11       ` Ihar Filipau
2001-09-10 16:10         ` Kari Hurtta
2001-09-14 10:03     ` Pavel Machek
2001-09-10  9:28   ` VDA
2001-09-10  9:35     ` John P. Looney
2001-09-02 21:30 ` Editing-in-place of a large file Ingo Oeser
2001-09-03  0:59   ` Larry McVoy
2001-09-03  1:24     ` Ingo Oeser
2001-09-03  1:31       ` Alan Cox
2001-09-03  1:50         ` Ingo Oeser
2001-09-03 10:48           ` Alan Cox
2001-09-03 14:31             ` Daniel Phillips
2001-09-03 14:46             ` Bob McElrath
2001-09-03 14:54               ` Alan Cox
2001-09-03 15:42                 ` Doug McNaught
2001-09-03 15:11               ` Richard Guenther
2001-09-03 21:19             ` Ben Ford
2001-09-03  4:27       ` Bob McElrath
2001-09-03  1:30     ` Daniel Phillips

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