[Pbuilder-maint] Re: pbuilder: cowdancer/cowbuilder status update
Junichi Uekawa
dancer at netfort.gr.jp
Thu Jan 12 23:42:08 UTC 2006
Hi,
> > This is an update on using userland COW method with pbuilder.
> >
> > cowdancer is a tool that allows you to "cp -al" (hardlink) a tree, and
> > break the hardlink when a write-open to a file is performed. The
> > adventurous part of cowdancer COW implementation is that it's trying
> > to do this from within userland only.
> >
> > cowbuilder doesn't really exist yet; it's a name for pbuilder ported
> > to fully use cowdancer. cowdancer is under development, and Debian
> > package exists in unstable. It seems like it's getting nearly there
> > with the feature set. With version 0.8, performance is improved
> > against a large tree (I profiled against building the kernel), and
> > with version 0.9, I fixed a bug which you could not replace /lib/ld.so
> > while cowdancer was running.
>
> Are you aware of fl-cow, which is a LD_PRELOAD userspace COW tool ?
It seems to be the tool with a same kind of goal. If I knew it
existed, I might have started from it. However, it only supports
'open', so it will have problems when used with pbuilder; for example,
file permissions are shared between files with same i-nodes. The
scope of implementation between the two applications is a bit
different.
[08:32:34]dancer64:fl-cow-0.6> ls -l test/
Makefile.am Makefile.in flcow-test.c flcow-test.sh
(the testsuite only contains test for 'open' and 'open64')
[08:33:16]dancer64:cowdancer> ls tests/
000_test_basic.sh 004_test_fopen64.sh 014_ilistdump_test.sh
001_test_symlink.sh 010_test_noilistfile.sh 900_test_pbuilder.sh
002_test_open.c 012_test_chown.c CVS
002_test_open.sh 012_test_chown.sh README
003_test_fopen.c 013_test_chmod.c log
003_test_fopen.sh 013_test_chmod.sh
004_test_fopen64.c 014_ilistdump_test.c
(the testsuite tests for apt-get dist-upgrade and debuild...)
Considering the difference, it might be better to improve desciprtions
of both packages.
Another difference I noticed is that fl-cow takes a list of
directories to protect in FL_COW, and seems to copy files
unconditionally on 'open'.
cowdancer caches a list of i-nodes so that it won't try to break
hardlinks more than once. (cow-shell does this much work).
regards,
junichi
--
dancer@{debian.org,netfort.gr.jp} Debian Project
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