Size problem

Mon Jan 13 03:32:00 GMT 2003

Hrm, I've always wondered about this one...
Jeff Sturm <jsturm@one-point.com> writes:
> objecting to, but the disk space savings

With the current price of hard drives, is this really a major concern?
> and memory savings

Someday I'd like to see a block-unifying filesystem. Every block
written to disk gets listed in a hash table. Duplicate blocks only
appear once on the disk. If you re-jigger your object file format to
take advantage of this, you get the disk savings and the in-memory
savings (copy on write assumed) automatically with zero extra (cough
cough libtool) effort.
We're playing around with block unification for netcache...
 http://www.megacz.com/netcache.pdf
 - a