Hello Peter, Wednesday, October 10, 2007, 1:59:20 PM, you wrote:
PE> At the lunch today we started talking about a feature that would PE> have been nice to have - a system call sort of similar to link(2) PE> where you would get a cloned copy of a file that would (initially) PE> share the same data blocks on the disk but would use copy-on-write PE> to create private copies as soon as something is modified. PE> It could be nice to use for example for a mail server using PE> maildir:s so that the mail delivery program sending a mail to PE> multiple users could use that syscall instead of writing N copies of the same mail... PE> (It would save space until the users would start to modifiy the files). While I totally second the idea (it has been discussed on zfs-discuss some time ago) in case of email platform it wouldn't be that easy as every file is different (different headers at least). But there are definitely other uses where it would be useful and improve user experience. I haven't looked into details but in theory one should be able to copy/move a file within the same datapool between datasets without having to actually copy data blocks... or maybe there's some detail which actually makes it hard to implement... -- Best regards, Robert Milkowski mailto:rmilkowski at task.gda.pl http://milek.blogspot.com
