Re: [ANNOUNCE] Btrfs: a copy on write, snapshotting FS

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Chris Mason wrote:
On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 02:20:26PM -0400, Chuck Lever wrote:
NetApp happens to use the standard NDMP protocol for sending the flattened file system. NetApp uses it for synchronous replication, volume migration, and back up to nearline storage and tape. AFS used "vol dump" and "vol restore" for migration, replication, and back-up. ZFS has the "zfs send" and "zfs receive" commands that do basically the same (Eric Kustarz recently published a blog entry that described how these work). And of course, all file system objects are able to be sent this way: streams, xattrs, ACLs, and so on are all supported.

Note also that NFSv4 supports the idea of migrated or replicated file objects. All that is needed to support it is a mechanism on the servers to actually move the data.

Stringing the replication together with the underlying FS would be neat.
Is there a way to deal with a master/slave setup, where the slave may be
out of date?

Among the implementations I'm aware of, there is a varying degree of integration into the physical file system. In general, it depends on how far out of date the slave is, and how closely the slave is supposed to be synchronized to the master.

A hot backup file system, for example, should be data-consistent within a few seconds of the master. A snapshot is used to initialize a slave, followed by a live stream of updates to the master being sent to slaves. Such a mechanism already exists on NetApp filers because they gather changes in NVRAM before committing them to the local file system. Simply put, these changes can also be bundled and sent to a local hot backup filer that is attached via Infiniband, or over the network to a remote hot backup filer.

For AFS, replication is done by maintaining a rw and ro copy of a volume on the designated master server. Changes are made to the rw copy over time. When admins want to push out a new version to replicas on another server, the ro copy on the master is replaced with a new snapshot, then this is pushed to the slaves. The replicas are always ro and are used mostly for load balancing; clients contact the closest or fastest server containing a replica of the volume they want to access. They always have a complete copy of the volume (ie no COW on the slaves).

I think you have designed into btrfs a lot of opportunity to implement this kind of data virtualization and management... I'm excited to see what can be done.
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