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Status Not under consideration
Created by Guest
Created on Jun 4, 2018

Provide efficient read-only file-level snapshots

Today, mmclone can be used to effectively provide a read-only snapshot of a single file (mv origfile snapfile ; mmclone snap snapfile ; mmclone copy snapfile origfile). But to clean up the snapshot when it is no longer needed requires mmclone split (followed by rm snapfile). This method forces any unmodified blocks between the two files to be duplicated into the writable clone, and for large files can take a while. This is made worse by the fact that the parent file is just going to be immediately deleted, so a more efficient mechanism to unlink the blocks would be ideal.

There are multiple ways this might be addressed, including:

- implement "mmclone unlink" to drop a parent file which only has one direct child by unlinking shared blocks and deleting blocks belonging only to the parent.

- implement a different command to create/delete a readonly copy-on-write clone of an existing file, which inverts the mmclone design (in which a RO file parents a RW file) into one where a RW file incepts a new RO file. It would be acceptable for our use case if only one RO file snapshot could exist for a given file at a time, but other customers might disagree and advocate a more flexible solution.

As always, we expect the actual implementation will be determined by IBM development.

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Sep 30, 2020

    Due to processing by IBM, this request was reassigned to have the following updated attributes:
    Brand - Servers and Systems Software
    Product family - IBM Spectrum Scale
    Product - Spectrum Scale (formerly known as GPFS) - Public RFEs
    Component - Product functionality

    For recording keeping, the previous attributes were:
    Brand - Servers and Systems Software
    Product family - IBM Spectrum Scale
    Product - Spectrum Scale (formerly known as GPFS) - Public RFEs
    Component - Technical Foundation