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I've recently added this documentation, Alasdair gave some corrections, and here are some further corrections on top of his work (partly style issue, partly a technical error due to different past experience, partly a note which I've added - i.e. transient snapshots are lighter). Cc: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Paolo 'Blaisorblade' Giarrusso <blaisorblade@yahoo.it> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
75 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
75 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
Device-mapper snapshot support
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==============================
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Device-mapper allows you, without massive data copying:
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*) To create snapshots of any block device i.e. mountable, saved states of
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the block device which are also writable without interfering with the
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original content;
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*) To create device "forks", i.e. multiple different versions of the
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same data stream.
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In both cases, dm copies only the chunks of data that get changed and
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uses a separate copy-on-write (COW) block device for storage.
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There are two dm targets available: snapshot and snapshot-origin.
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*) snapshot-origin <origin>
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which will normally have one or more snapshots based on it.
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Reads will be mapped directly to the backing device. For each write, the
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original data will be saved in the <COW device> of each snapshot to keep
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its visible content unchanged, at least until the <COW device> fills up.
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*) snapshot <origin> <COW device> <persistent?> <chunksize>
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A snapshot of the <origin> block device is created. Changed chunks of
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<chunksize> sectors will be stored on the <COW device>. Writes will
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only go to the <COW device>. Reads will come from the <COW device> or
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from <origin> for unchanged data. <COW device> will often be
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smaller than the origin and if it fills up the snapshot will become
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useless and be disabled, returning errors. So it is important to monitor
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the amount of free space and expand the <COW device> before it fills up.
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<persistent?> is P (Persistent) or N (Not persistent - will not survive
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after reboot).
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The difference is that for transient snapshots less metadata must be
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saved on disk - they can be kept in memory by the kernel.
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How this is used by LVM2
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========================
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When you create the first LVM2 snapshot of a volume, four dm devices are used:
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1) a device containing the original mapping table of the source volume;
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2) a device used as the <COW device>;
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3) a "snapshot" device, combining #1 and #2, which is the visible snapshot
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volume;
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4) the "original" volume (which uses the device number used by the original
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source volume), whose table is replaced by a "snapshot-origin" mapping
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from device #1.
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A fixed naming scheme is used, so with the following commands:
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lvcreate -L 1G -n base volumeGroup
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lvcreate -L 100M --snapshot -n snap volumeGroup/base
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we'll have this situation (with volumes in above order):
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# dmsetup table|grep volumeGroup
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volumeGroup-base-real: 0 2097152 linear 8:19 384
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volumeGroup-snap-cow: 0 204800 linear 8:19 2097536
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volumeGroup-snap: 0 2097152 snapshot 254:11 254:12 P 16
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volumeGroup-base: 0 2097152 snapshot-origin 254:11
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# ls -lL /dev/mapper/volumeGroup-*
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brw------- 1 root root 254, 11 29 ago 18:15 /dev/mapper/volumeGroup-base-real
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brw------- 1 root root 254, 12 29 ago 18:15 /dev/mapper/volumeGroup-snap-cow
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brw------- 1 root root 254, 13 29 ago 18:15 /dev/mapper/volumeGroup-snap
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brw------- 1 root root 254, 10 29 ago 18:14 /dev/mapper/volumeGroup-base
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