Hi!
> > 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).
Actually, 40% of my disk capacity is wasted in duplicates. Why? I do
cp -a linux linux.backup before major changes. Automagicall ways to
get space back would be nice. (I also cp -a package ofic.package, so
that I can diff -ur later... Hardlinks are not enough because I do not
want to accidentaly trash ofic.)
So, I'd actually like cow-link. cp -a --cow-link mc ofic.mc would be
very usefull for me.
Pavel
-- I'm pavel@ucw.cz. "In my country we have almost anarchy and I don't care." Panos Katsaloulis describing me w.r.t. patents me at discuss@linmodems.org- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Mar 07 2000 - 21:00:15 EST