Hi Jeff
Can you introduce more detail about your way 1?
And now we are trying to implement a new translator just upon the translator
"posix", it compress data and then through next translator "posix"
write to disk? But in "writev" function, it can only deal "struct
iovec" and comress it. But how to identify whether the file writing is
"end" or how to identify the "iovec" is the last part of the file?
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Darcy [mailto:jdarcy@redhat.com]
Sent: Friday, July 05, 2013 9:01 PM
To: cloudfs-devel(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
Cc: Sun, Yongjie
Subject: Re: How to implement data compression function in GlusterFS/HeKeFS
On 07/03/2013 08:51 PM, Sun, Yongjie wrote:
Hi all Recently, we want to implement a new translator for data
compression, would you guys can give some advises? We want to make the
new translator upon the “Posix”, any suggestions?
There are two basic ways you could do this.
* Whole file: keep files uncompressed while they're open, compressed otherwise.
It shouldn't be hard to use the GFID to establish correspondence between the two.
* Block: compress each (possibly large) block separately, maintaining a list of mappings
from user-visible uncompressed offsets to internal compressed offsets.
The problem with the whole-file approach is *huge* latency on the first open of a file,
and high server load re-compressing after close. This problem would be especially acute
for small updates to large files, as e.g. some cloud provisioning tools will do to
"personalize" virtual-machine images. For that reason, I think the block-wise
approach is the only really usable option.
The problem with the block-wise approach is complexity. Space management is going to get
more complicated as a less compressible version of a block is written over a more
compressible version, forcing new space to be allocated at the physical EOF. Reporting
the correct file size can also be surprisingly difficult. Lastly, this approach requires
careful synchronization between reads and writes involving blocks that are in the process
of being de/compressed. It can be done, but it would take significant effort.
Given this complexity, you might be better off just running a normal GlusterFS on top of a
local filesystem or block-device driver that does its own compression. Unfortunately,
when I looked for such a thing the options seemed quite poor. That's a surprise, and
maybe an opportunity for some enterprising person to write a dm-compress target (for
example) that's usable by far more than just GlusterFS.