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Date:      Fri, 3 Mar 2000 11:42:43 -0700 (MST)
From:      "Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov>
To:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Copy-on-write filesystem
Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.20.0003031140080.921-100000@mini.acl.lanl.gov>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.10003031338080.1135-100000@bsd1.nyct.net>

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On Fri, 3 Mar 2000, Michael Bacarella wrote:

> Can someone tell me why copy-on-write filesystems would be bad?

It's a good idea. Peter Braam and I have written a device (called memdev)
for linux (sorry!) that implements a virtual-memory-backed copy-on-write
block device (like the loopback device, but uses anon vm pages for store).

It's pretty interesting. It's quite fast, and copy-on-write does seem to
work OK for a filesystem. I'm using this thing as one of two pieces of a
new private name space implementation that would also work quite well on
freebsd. 

note it's not really a file system, but a loopback block device which does
copy-on-write for new blocks. 

You can also use it to easily implement translucent file system behaviour.

ron



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