On Wed, 2009-07-29 at 15:06 +0300, Andriy Gapon wrote:
> What do you think about the following feature?
>
> "Subdirectory is automatically a new filesystem" property - an administrator
> turns
> on this magic property of a filesystem, after that every mkdir *in the root*
> of
> that filesystem creates a new filesystem. The new filesystems have
> default/inherited properties except for the magic property which is off.
>
> Right now I see this as being mostly useful for /home. Main benefit in this
> case
> is that various user administration tools can work unmodified and do the right
> thing when an administrator wants a policy of a separate fs per user
> But I am sure that there could be other interesting uses for this.
This feature request touches upon a very generic observation that my
group made a long time ago: ZFS is a wonderful filesystem, the only
trouble is that (almost) all the cool features have to be asked for
using non-filesystem (POSIX) APIs. Basically everytime you have
to do anything with ZFS you have to do it on a host where ZFS runs.
The sole exception from this rule is .zfs subdirectory that lets you
have access to snapshots without explicit calls to zfs(1M).
Basically .zfs subdirectory is your POSIX FS way to request two bits
of ZFS functionality. In general, however, we all want more.
On the read-only front: wouldn't it be cool to *not* run zfs sends
explicitly but have:
.zfs/send/<snap name>
.zfs/sendr/<from-snap-name>-<to-snap-name>
give you the same data automagically?
On the read-write front: wouldn't it be cool to be able to snapshot
things by:
$ mkdir .zfs/snapshot/<snap-name>
?
The list goes on...
Thanks,
Roman.
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