Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>Any thought to making a file plugin that creates copy on write files? >The operation would be something like a hardlink which is invisible to >the user and broken as soon as either file is modified. > >Files could be COWed by a flag on the cp command (or really, perhaps >that should be the default behavior) or with a utility (perhaps run as >a periodic script to locate duplicates and COW them. This would >greatly speed up the process of copying files. > >The behavior on break could be to duplicate the whole cowed file on >the first right, or allow a COWed file to have alternate choices for >blocks. Files would remain cowed until decowed, which would likely be >bad for performance (due to fragmentation of alternate versions >causing gaps in sequential scans), so the repacker could be taught to >decow files that have too many alternate blocks. > > > > we are open to patches for this, and nobody is writing one....;-)
