Pawel Jakub Dawidek wrote: > On Fri, Oct 12, 2007 at 11:10:31AM +0100, Darren J Moffat wrote: >> Pawel Jakub Dawidek wrote: >>> I understand it's not trivial, but beeing able to reference the same >>> block from different datasets would be a really nice feature to have. >>> The functionality discussed above if only one example. Another example >>> would be block aggregation (which has its own name I can't recall right >>> now), so we can run a thread once a day that frees duplicated blocks and >>> make datasets to point at one copy only. >> NTFS can do this within a single filesystem. >> >> It feels to me almost like the opposite of ditto blocks :-) Though I >> would still want ditto blocks to work with this. > > My mine use will be for things like Solaris zones or FreeBSD jails. It > is nice to have one base file system, which you can just clone, but over > the time the clones are getting bigger and bigger. If you sell virtual > web servers for example and all you costumers upgrade apache to a new > version you end up with X copies of the same blocks and you lose > everything you saved by using clones initially. Beeing able to run a > process in the background every night, which will aggregate the blocks > back would be really nice.
Yeah, that would be nice. De-duplication is on the list of problems we'd like to attack sooner rather than later. --matt
