Hello Russ,
There is a window (I think ten seconds) between snap -a and fossil deciding to start archiving. If you access any file in those ten seconds then enough of the root gets copied-on-write that you shouldn't see the deadlock at all.
What happens if some accesses come from Internet during that time ? Files in /sys/log/* are big enough. Sorry I couldn't understand "the root".
Kenji Arisawa
