New hammer utility feature in HEAD: 'hammer cleanup'

[Matthew Dillon]

:Nice!
:
:It would be nice if hammer(8) included a command to list all PFSs
:(maybe pfs-status without arguments);
:this could be used for a general way to iterate PFSs.
:Is this info saved in a HAMMER fs?
:
:A few questions:
: - `hammer snapshot' is a per PFS operation, right?

    It should be.  I've gone over that code several times and it restricts
    the scan to a single PFS, but I haven't actually tested that it works
    as advertised.

: - Is null mounts the recommended way to use PFSs in general?

    Yes, a null mount of the PFS softlink is a ton better then going
    directly through the softlink.  You get a real mount point so
    userland expects the inodes to be in a different domain (which they
    are).  If you run through just a softlink userland can get confused
    by the 'duplicate' inode spaces.

    What I've been doing is creating PFS softlinks in <filesystem>/pfs/<name>
    and then null-mounting it to where it is supposed to go.

: - Is PFS #0 (the hammer fs) a fully functional PFS
:(mirroring capable)?
:
: -thomas

    Yes.  It is always PFS #0 and always a pfs-master.  hammer pfs-downgrade
    will not allow you to downgrade the primary filesystem to a slave as a
    safety (though if you ran the ioctl() manually it would).  The primary
    filesystem can be used as a mirroring source but I don't want people
    to use the primary filesystem as a mirroring target.

    Note that primary filesystem (PFS#0) will not dive into other PFSs.

    There is an issue with <filesystem>/snapshots which I haven't resolved
    yet.  If you mirror a PFS to a slave, <filesystem>/snapshots gets
    mirrored as well, but you do not necessarily want the master's snapshots
    to be the same as the slave's.  So snapshots of mirroring slaves would
    have to be stored elsewhere.  I need to add some logic to detect that a
    PFS is a slave and not try to access <filesystem>/snapshots when pruning
    it.

    I'll have to think of how best to handle it.  I do have extra fields
    in the pfs data structure that I can use to store an alternative
    snapshots directory location.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>