The two sides of reflink()

There's lots of discussion of a similar issue known as "over committing", and also in the memory limiting cgroup code, where I think a lot can be learnt on different solutions to the problem.

One example - if you share somebody's file and it doesn't count as your own space, then the original owner deletes their copy, the space is now soley allocated to you, and so should count against your quota? This act could push you way over your quota; what if the file alone is bigger than your complete quota?

What if two people are sharing a file that you delete? Should what's on your quota be divided equally amongst the two of them? If you want to be fair, surely the thing to do when you share a file from someone else is add half of its size to your own quote, and remove half of it from theres. If you share the file, you should share the cost?

If it goes straight onto your quota when you share it, you simply don't have to worry about any of these - but you also do at the same time lose certain benefits of sharing the data. With VMs, over-committing can often be specified as a %, maybe a similar option for sharing files... sharing a file could save you a certain % of its size from your quota, which then means if you suddenly become the sole owner, you only have added the remaining % rather than the full 100%. The % chosen would be linked to the average reference count of all blocks that you own, as this shows the likelyhook of any block being or becoming soley yours.