Re: [ANNOUNCE] Btrfs: a copy on write, snapshotting FS

["Pádraig Brady" <P@draigBrady.com>]

Vladislav Bolkhovitin wrote:
> 
> I would also suggest one more feature: support for block level
> de-duplication. I mean:
> 
> 1. Ability for Btrfs to have blocks in several files to point to the
> same block on disk
> 
> 2. Support for new syscall or IOCTL to de-duplicate as a single
> transaction two or more blocks on disk, i.e. link them to one of them
> and free others
> 
> 3. De-de-duplicate blocks on disk, i.e. copy them on write
> 
> I suppose that de-duplication itself would be done by some user space
> process that would scan files, determine blocks with the same data and
> then de-duplicate them by using syscall or IOCTL (2).
> 
> That would be very usable feature, which in most cases would allow to
> shrink occupied disk space on 50-90%.

Have you references for this number?
In my experience one gets a lot of benefit from
the much simpler process of "de-duplication" of files.

Note a checksum stored in file metadata,
that is automatically invalidated on write would
speed up user space file de duplification,
and rsync, etc....

Pádraig.