[zfs-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: ZFS consistency guarantee

2007-06-09 Thread Richard L. Hamilton
I wish there was a uniform way whereby applications could
register their ability to achieve or release consistency on demand,
and if registered, could also communicate back that they had
either achieved consistency on-disk, or were unable to do so.  That
would allow backup procedures to automatically talk to apps capable
of such functions, to get them to a known state on-disk before taking
a snapshot.  That would allow one to for example not stop a DBMS, but
simply have it seem to pause for a moment while achieving consistency
and until told that the snapshot was complete; thus providing minimum
impact while still having fully usable backups (and without needing to
do the database backups _through_ the DBMS).  

Something I heard once leads me to believe that some such facility
or convention for how to communicate such issues with e.g. database
server processes exists on Windows.  If they've got it, we really ought
to have something even better, right? :-)

(That's of course not specific to ZFS, but would be useful with any filesystem
that can take snapshots.)
 
 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: ZFS consistency guarantee

2007-06-09 Thread David Magda

On Jun 9, 2007, at 06:14, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:


I wish there was a uniform way whereby applications could
register their ability to achieve or release consistency on demand,
and if registered, could also communicate back that they had
either achieved consistency on-disk, or were unable to do so.


This doesn't (necessarily) have to be built into the kernel: a user  
space program could work as (say like D-Bus).


Any interested program can register / listen for updates (read-only),  
and anytime a backup program is about to run it can send out an event  
saying that the /foo/bar directory tree (and below) will be backed up  
(or snapshotted (word?)).


If you have /var/run/backups| where the user ownership is the backup  
program's user (or using a SUID program to send notifications), an  
the group is read-only (640), process owners (like oracle, mysql,  
postgres, etc.) are members of that read-only group so that they  
can't affect other programs by sending spurious messages.


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