bcachefs - snapshots

From: Kent Overstreet
Date: Sun Sep 26 2021 - 21:49:18 EST


Snapshots have been merged! 9 months of work and 3k lines of new code, finally
released. Some highlights:

- btrfs style subvolumes & snapshots interface
- snapshots are writeable
- highly scalable: number of snapshots is limited only by your disk space
- highly space efficient: no internal fragmentation issues

Design doc here: https://bcachefs.org/Snapshots/

The core functionality is complete - snapshot creation and deletion works, fsck
changes are done (most of the complexity was in making fsck work without
O(number of snapshots) performance - tricky). Everything else is a todo item:

- still need to export different st_dev for files in different subvolumes
(we'll never allocate a new inode with an inode number that collides with an
inode inother subvolume - but snapshots will naturally result in colliding
inode numbers)

- need to hide dirents that point to snapshots when inside snapshots...

- snapshot creation is not atomic w.r.t. page cache, we do sync_fs() but don't
block buffered writes

- other niggling page cache stuff - need to walk page cache and mark blocks as
no longer reserved on snapshot creation

- we no longer have quota support, since old style quotas interact badly with
snapshots

- we need per subvolume disk space accounting before i can implement btrfs
style subvolume quotas

- all the things I neglected to think of yet, and all the bugs I haven't found
yet

Go wild, please try and break it.