On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, Richard Torkar wrote:
> Well, actually AFAIKT, it's not symbolic links as we have in UNIX-land
> that's the great part.
> As I understand it it's the server part actively searching for identical
> files and then symlinking them, i.e. automagically.
>
> What I can't figure out is, why it took them so many years, and are they
> really first?
I don't know their implementation, but it sounds like 'copy on write' but
on disk instead of in RAM - and with a tool that merges the blocks or
files into a COW-marked block/file at regular intervals.
The big question is of course, why they HAVE so much redundancy on disk in
the first place in their "flagship OS", that they need to resort to things
like this to avoid it :) I mean, if redundancy really is that big a
problem on a Linux box, we would have had compression techniques like this
long ago (which it's all about - it's compression, but disguised in
abstract files and "stores" instead of bit-string matching).
Bjorn
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