On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Lukas Czerner <lczerner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi Amir, > > thanks very much for the resend. I'll take a look at the whole patch > series, but first I want to bring up one important thing. > > While this being a huge feature for ext4 (regardless on how > intrusive it is for the usual code paths) and while we already have > patches in the list with people interesting in looking into them, you > should clearly clarify what is the gain of it, what is the use case (and > I know you have one), and why it is better than other approaches. You > know, advertise it a bit in the marketing way :). Hi Lukas, Thank you for pointing out the marketing aspect. I must admit that my user-case rather speaks for itself. CTERA develops a NAS device which is specialized for backing up local networks and snapshots gives the NAS a time dimension without paying for it in disk space and performance. The reason for not going with btrfs 3 years ago is clear. So why not go with it now instead of moving forward to ext4 with snapshots? Part of the answer lies in the possibility to run fsck -x, which gets rid of the snapshots in the case of fs corruption and gets you back to good old stable and consistent ext4. > > There is some confusion among developers on what actually are benefits > of ext4 snapshots in comparison to btrfs, or in comparison to the new > dm_multisnap code. I know that you have done quite a lot of testing to > assure that it does not actually change old ext4 behavior when snapshot > disabled, and that it works well when enabled, but have you done any > performance related benchmarks ? Do you have any expectations on how it > should behave in different work loads ? > > It would be great to see and be able to confirm that ext4 snapshots are > really a win, not only on the feature side, but on the performance side > as well. I know that there are people out there still undecided or > having a strange feeling about your snapshot work. But who can blame > them, when we have not seen any hard data on this matter ? Ehm.. I did present this benchmark on LSF: http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=amir73il-4632-11284-26560 unless you snoozed ;-) it shows performance vs. ext4 w/o snapshots and with snapshots and while taking snapshots. I did not compare with btrfs, but I bet there are ext4 vs. btrfs benchmarks out there. dm-multisnap is better than dm-snap only when it comes to overhead per snapshot. it still copies every written block, which is far from being the case in ext4 snapshots. > > So I, for myself, and I believe there are others, would like to see some > benchmark numbers and comparison (both, features and performance) with at > least new dm-multisnap code and probably btrfs and plain ext4 as well. > > Thanks! > -Lukas > > > On Tue, 7 Jun 2011, amir73il@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > >> Hi All, >> >> I am resending the snapshots patch series as per Lukas's request. >> This time, the snapshot*.c files have not been omitted, as in >> the previous posting. >> >> The series is still based on ext4 dev branch sometime in the preparation >> for 3.0 merge window. It was not yet rebased on 3.0-rc1, so punch holes >> changes have not been addressed yet. >> >> As always, I advocate online review of the patches at: >> https://github.com/amir73il/ext4-snapshots/commits/for-ext4-v1 >> but if you insist on doing it the old way, I won't complain. >> >> Thanks, >> Amir. >> >> [PATCH v1 01/36] ext4: EXT4 snapshots (Experimental) >> [PATCH v1 02/36] ext4: snapshot debugging support >> [PATCH v1 03/36] ext4: snapshot hooks - inside JBD hooks >> [PATCH v1 04/36] ext4: snapshot hooks - block bitmap access >> [PATCH v1 05/36] ext4: snapshot hooks - delete blocks >> [PATCH v1 06/36] ext4: snapshot hooks - move data blocks >> [PATCH v1 07/36] ext4: snapshot hooks - direct I/O >> [PATCH v1 08/36] ext4: snapshot hooks - move extent file data blocks >> [PATCH v1 09/36] ext4: snapshot file >> [PATCH v1 10/36] ext4: snapshot file - read through to block device >> [PATCH v1 11/36] ext4: snapshot file - permissions >> [PATCH v1 12/36] ext4: snapshot file - store on disk >> [PATCH v1 13/36] ext4: snapshot file - increase maximum file size limit to 16TB >> [PATCH v1 14/36] ext4: snapshot block operations >> [PATCH v1 15/36] ext4: snapshot block operation - copy blocks to snapshot >> [PATCH v1 16/36] ext4: snapshot block operation - move blocks to snapshot >> [PATCH v1 17/36] ext4: snapshot block operation - copy block bitmap to snapshot >> [PATCH v1 18/36] ext4: snapshot control >> [PATCH v1 19/36] ext4: snapshot control - init new snapshot >> [PATCH v1 20/36] ext4: snapshot control - fix new snapshot >> [PATCH v1 21/36] ext4: snapshot control - reserve disk space for snapshot >> [PATCH v1 22/36] ext4: snapshot journaled - increase transaction credits >> [PATCH v1 23/36] ext4: snapshot journaled - implement journal_release_buffer() >> [PATCH v1 24/36] ext4: snapshot journaled - bypass to save credits >> [PATCH v1 25/36] ext4: snapshot journaled - cache last COW tid in journal_head >> [PATCH v1 26/36] ext4: snapshot journaled - trace COW/buffer credits >> [PATCH v1 27/36] ext4: snapshot list support >> [PATCH v1 28/36] ext4: snapshot list - read through to previous snapshot >> [PATCH v1 29/36] ext4: snapshot race conditions - concurrent COW bitmap operations >> [PATCH v1 30/36] ext4: snapshot race conditions - concurrent COW operations >> [PATCH v1 31/36] ext4: snapshot race conditions - tracked reads >> [PATCH v1 32/36] ext4: snapshot exclude - the exclude bitmap >> [PATCH v1 33/36] ext4: snapshot cleanup >> [PATCH v1 34/36] ext4: snapshot cleanup - shrink deleted snapshots >> [PATCH v1 35/36] ext4: snapshot cleanup - merge shrunk snapshots >> [PATCH v1 36/36] ext4: snapshot rocompat - enable rw mount >> >> fs/ext4/Kconfig | 11 + >> fs/ext4/Makefile | 3 + >> fs/ext4/balloc.c | 132 +++ >> fs/ext4/ext4.h | 188 ++++- >> fs/ext4/ext4_jbd2.c | 162 ++++- >> fs/ext4/ext4_jbd2.h | 266 ++++++- >> fs/ext4/extents.c | 157 ++++- >> fs/ext4/file.c | 11 +- >> fs/ext4/ialloc.c | 19 +- >> fs/ext4/inode.c | 668 +++++++++++++-- >> fs/ext4/ioctl.c | 120 +++ >> fs/ext4/mballoc.c | 161 ++++- >> fs/ext4/move_extent.c | 3 +- >> fs/ext4/namei.c | 9 + >> fs/ext4/resize.c | 19 +- >> fs/ext4/snapshot.c | 1000 ++++++++++++++++++++++ >> fs/ext4/snapshot.h | 690 ++++++++++++++++ >> fs/ext4/snapshot_buffer.c | 393 +++++++++ >> fs/ext4/snapshot_ctl.c | 2002 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ >> fs/ext4/snapshot_debug.c | 107 +++ >> fs/ext4/snapshot_debug.h | 105 +++ >> fs/ext4/snapshot_inode.c | 960 ++++++++++++++++++++++ >> fs/ext4/super.c | 157 ++++- >> fs/ext4/xattr.c | 4 +- >> 24 files changed, 7182 insertions(+), 165 deletions(-) >> >> > > -- > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
