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Date:      Sun, 31 Mar 2002 14:14:31 -0800
From:      Kirk McKusick <mckusick@beastie.mckusick.com>
To:        Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
Cc:        Alfred Perlstein <bright@mu.org>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: UFS snapshots in current 
Message-ID:  <200203312214.g2VMEWD07500@beastie.mckusick.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 31 Mar 2002 01:50:10 EST." <p05101537b8cc5eb19b8e@[128.113.24.47]> 

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	Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 01:50:10 -0500
	To: Alfred Perlstein <bright@mu.org>
	From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
	Subject: Re: UFS snapshots in current
	Cc: Kirk McKusick <mckusick@beastie.mckusick.com>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG

	At 8:50 PM -0800 3/30/02, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
	>Looks like you hit one of the snapshot deadlock conditions,
	>Dr McKusick recently introduced a fix for one of the
	>deadlocks so this may not happen again...

	In the past week?  The "old" current system which I had
	been running should have been from March 26th, when I
	rebuilt it to see if it would fix my vmware problems
	(which it did...).  I don't see any commits wrt softupdates
	which are that recent.

	-- 
	Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
	Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
	Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu

All of the above is basically correct. Your use of a snapshot
over a long period of time and in particular over a CVS update,
build world, and install world should not cause trouble (other
than perhaps a large amount of disk space being used). There
is no problem with rebooting, provided that the filesystem with
the snapshot is cleanly unmounted. Snapshots can be made to
survive panics by setting `sysctl -w debug.dopersistence=1'
but at a non-trivial performance cost. The problem that you
encountered was most likely a deadlock in the snapshot code.
I fixed one deadlock last January, but am aware of at least
one more that is still there. I have a fairly good idea on how
to fix it, but have not yet had the time to work on that fix.
On your final question about making a pax archive, if you make
an archive of the real filesystem, the snapshot will show up
on the archive as a file the size of the filesystem partition. 
If you mount the snapshot and then make an archive of that
filesystem, then the snapshot(s) in the archive will show up
as zero length files.

	Kirk McKusick

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