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Initial EXPERIMENTAL implementation of device-mapper thin provisioning
with snapshot support. The 'thin' target is used to create instances of
the virtual devices that are hosted in the 'thin-pool' target. The
thin-pool target provides data sharing among devices. This sharing is
made possible using the persistent-data library in the previous patch.
The main highlight of this implementation, compared to the previous
implementation of snapshots, is that it allows many virtual devices to
be stored on the same data volume, simplifying administration and
allowing sharing of data between volumes (thus reducing disk usage).
Another big feature is support for arbitrary depth of recursive
snapshots (snapshots of snapshots of snapshots ...). The previous
implementation of snapshots did this by chaining together lookup tables,
and so performance was O(depth). This new implementation uses a single
data structure so we don't get this degradation with depth.
For further information and examples of how to use this, please read
Documentation/device-mapper/thin-provisioning.txt
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <thornber@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
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