Re: How does Suse do live filesystem revert with btrfs?

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On Sun, May 04, 2014 at 04:26:45PM -0700, Marc MERLIN wrote:
> Actually, never mind Suse, does someone know whether you can revert to
> an older snapshot in place?

   Not while the system's running useful services, no.

> The only way I can think of is to mount the snapshot on top of the other
> filesystem. This gets around the umounting a filesystem with open
> filehandles problem, but this also means that you have to keep track of
> daemons that are still accessing filehandles on the overlayed
> filesystem.

   You have a good handle on the problems.

> My one concern with this approach is that you can't free up the
> subvolume/snapshot of the underlying filesystem if it's mounted and even
> after you free up filehandles pointing to it, I don't think you can
> umount it.
> 
> In other words, you can play this trick to delay a reboot a bit, but
> ultimately you'll have to reboot to free up the mountpoints, old
> subvolumes, and be able to delete them.

   Yup.

> Somehow I'm thinking Suse came up with a better method.

   I'm guessing it involves reflink copies of files from the snapshot
back to the "original", and then restarting affected services. That's
about the only other thing that I can think of, but it's got load of
race conditions in it (albeit difficult to hit in most cases, I
suspect).

   Hugo.

> Even if you don't know Suse, can you think of a better way to do this?
> 
> Thanks,
> Marc
> 
> On Sat, May 03, 2014 at 05:52:57PM -0700, Marc MERLIN wrote:
> > (more questions I'm asking myself while writing my talk slides)
> > 
> > I know Suse uses btrfs to roll back filesystem changes.
> > 
> > So I understand how you can take a snapshot before making a change, but
> > not how you revert to that snapshot without rebooting or using rsync,
> > 
> > How do you do a pivot-root like mountpoint swap to an older snapshot,
> > especially if you have filehandles opened on the current snapshot?
> > 
> > Is that what Suse manages, or are they doing something simpler?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Marc
> 

-- 
=== Hugo Mills: hugo@... carfax.org.uk | darksatanic.net | lug.org.uk ===
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