From: "Valdis Klētnieks" <valdis.kletnieks@vt.edu>
To: Bharath Vedartham <linux.bhar@gmail.com>
Cc: kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org
Subject: Re: Overwriting copy functionality in filesystem
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2019 10:06:36 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <10332.1553436396@turing-police> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20190324131808.GA24735@bharath12345-Inspiron-5559>
On Sun, 24 Mar 2019 18:48:08 +0530, Bharath Vedartham said:
> I was interested in implementing copy-on-write for my filesystem(for fun
> :P). When I do a "cp" operation, I do not want to create a seperate
> inode for the new file. I only want to create a inode when I make a
> change to the file.
Actually, /bin/cp isn't where copy-on-write gets you benefits. Where it really
shines is when you have a versioning filesystem that keeps track of the last
N versions of a file with minimum overhead. So if you have a 100 megabyte
file, open it, write 5 blocks of data, and close it, you now can read back
either the original or new versions of the file, and you're only using 100M plus
5 blocks plus a tiny bit of metadata.
> There is no vfs api for cp. I would need to make creat syscall aware of the
> fact that it is being executed by "cp". My immediate idea was to check
> if a file with the same data exists in the filesystem but that would be
> way too much overhead.
Have you looked at other filesystems that already support copy-on-write?
Hint: How do file systems that support point-in-time snapshots work?
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-03-24 14:07 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-03-23 16:59 Overwriting copy functionality in filesystem Bharath Vedartham
2019-03-23 19:01 ` Valdis Klētnieks
2019-03-24 13:18 ` Bharath Vedartham
2019-03-24 14:06 ` Valdis Klētnieks [this message]
2019-03-28 18:30 ` Bharath Vedartham
2019-03-28 20:07 ` Valdis Klētnieks
2019-03-23 19:03 ` Bernd Petrovitsch
2019-03-24 13:21 ` Bharath Vedartham
2019-03-23 19:05 ` Greg KH
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