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a reflink would be a new type of inodea reflink would be a new type of inodePosted May 7, 2009 10:12 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769)In reply to: a reflink would be a new type of inode by corbet Parent article: The two sides of reflink()
A reflink would be a new type of inode only in so far as the filesystem must track the fact that it has blocks shared with another inode. There is no difference, though, between an inode created by a reflink and the file's original inode; they both become reflink inodes.Ah, so it is symmetric, somewhat like making a hard link with 'ln'. If one of the two reflink inodes is then removed, does the other one revert back to being a normal file? If not, is there any difference between a lone reflink inode and a normal one? Couldn't all files be reflinks?
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a reflink would be a new type of inode Posted May 7, 2009 22:59 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I believe that one of the features of a reflink is that it tells you what else it's linked with, so that you can find it to break the COW
if this isn't the case, it should be, for just this reason.
as I understand things, if a file is changed it may break the linking entirely (copying the entire file), or it may break the link partially (still sharing the common parts of the file, but with the differences being separated) at the option of the filesystem
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