Re: Introducing Next3 - built-in snapshots support for Ext3

["Amir G." <amir73il@users.sourceforge.net>]

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Andi Kleen wrote:
> "Amir G." writes:
>>
>> Yes, of course, I realize that. This is the reason I chose to
>> introduce Next3 as a new f/s,
>> which was branched from Ext3 and not as a new feature to Ext3.
>> Unfortunately, merging Next3 snapshots feature into Ext4 is not an easy task,
>> because extent mapped files break the design concepts of Next3 snapshots.
>
> As I understand it the ext4 code base still supports not having
> extents enabled in the super block (although I'm not sure how well
> that variant is tested in practice)
>
> So in theory you could have a feature that requires disabling extents.
>
> It might not make users very happy though.
>

In theory, it is possible to have 2 modes for Ext4 (extents or snapshots)
and some would argue that it makes sense to do that.
But I think that making that decision can be deferred to a later time,
after people have experienced with Next3 and have decided if they
would like to have
the snapshot feature merged into Ext4 or not.

Besides, it would take me a considerable amount of time to merge the
snapshot feature into Ext4,
and Next3 is ready to be used now.

Amir.