Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
>>>> I am thinking about starting to work on a data deduplicating
blockdevice, a kernel module called blockless.
If done smartly, this may perhaps be possible, but the problem is the
filesystem's metadata. Is this going to be dedup'ed? How much will
this take? A simple backup will update atime on all the files backed
up, and although atime isn't always wanted or needed, the problem
occurs elsewhere.
Block level deduplication isn't going to know/care about the
difference between file contents and metadata. It is either stored in
blocks that match other blocks or not and the difference should not be
visible to the filesystem living on top of the block device.
My point exactly. If dedup was to be done on the block layer, you'd need
flag to say "do not dedup this".
Why? How can it possibly make any difference? It's not likely that
you'd have dupes in the metadata block, but if you do it doesn't matter
that they are transparently mapped into one. You need a copy-on-write
mechanism anyway since if you write to either they won't be dups any more.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@gmail.com
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