On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 17:59 +0200, Thomas Glanzmann wrote: > Hello, > I have a few more questions to this: > > - Is there a checksum for every block in btrfs? Yes, but they are only crc32c. > > - Is it possible to retrieve these checksums from userland? > Not today. The sage developers sent a patch to make an ioctl for this, but since it was hard coded to crc32c I haven't taken it yet. > - Is it possible to use a blocksize of 4 or 8 kbyte with btrfs? > Yes, btrfs uses extents but for the purposes of dedup, 4k blocksizes are fine. > To get a bit more specific: If it is relatively easy to identify and > deduplicate blocks, and if btrfs supports relatively small block sizes > like 4 / 8 kbyte, it is the perfect candidate for VMs. To give you some > data. I took 300 Gbyte (note this is the disk space that is used not the > provisioned space (the space that isn't currently used by the VM so it's the > data that are in use) of VMs running different operating systems and used a > perl script to identify how many data could be deduped give a specific > blocksize: > Virtual machines are the ideal dedup workload. But, you do get a big portion of the dedup benefits by just starting with a common image and cloning it instead of doing copies of each vm. -chris -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
