[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on 08/22/2008 04:26:35 PM:
> Just my 2c: Is it possible to do an "offline" dedup, kind of like
> snapshotting?
>
> What I mean in practice, is: we make many Solaris full-root zones.
> They share a lot of data as complete files. This is kind of easy to
> save space - make one zone as a template, snapshot/clone its
> dataset, make new zones.
>
> However, as projects evolve (software installed, etc.) these zones
> are filled with many similar files, many of which are duplicates.
>
> It seems reasonable to make some dedup process which would create a
> least-common-denominator snapshot for all the datasets involved
> (zone roots), of which all other datasets' current data are to be
> dubbed "clones with modified data".
>
> For the system (and user) it should be perceived just the same as
> these datasets are currently "clones with modified data" of the
> original template zone-root dataset. Only the "template" becomes
different...
>
> Hope this idea makes sense, and perhaps makes its way into code sometime
:)
>
Jim,
There have been a few long threads about this in the past on this
list. My take is that it is worthwhile, but should (or really needs to)
wait until the resilver/resize/evac code is done and the zfs libs are
stabilized and public (meaning people can actually write non throw away
code against them). Some people feel that dedup is over extending the
premise of the filesystem (and would unnecessarily complicate the code).
Some feel that the benefits would be less than we suspect. I would expect
first dedup code you see to be written by non sun people -- and if it is
enticing enough to be backported to trunk (maybe). There are a bunch of
need-to-haves sitting in queue that Sun needs to focus on such as real
user/group quotas, disk shrink/evac, utility/toolkit for failed pool
recovery (beyond skull and bones forensic tools), etc that should be way
ahead of the line vs dedup.
-Wade
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