[linux-lvm] access or interface to list of blocks that have, changed via C.O.W.?

[Linda Walsh]

Mark Woodward wrote:
> There are a couple projects that do this. They are pretty much based 
> on ddsnap. You can google it.
> In LVM2 world, it is fairly trivial to do what you want to do.
---
    I figured it was likely -- I as LVM2 has to to know what blocks
change to make realtime snapshots.  I just am trying to figure out how
to get a list of those blocks -- can I query some util and get the blocks
that are different at that point?   I was figuring on using that with
a blockmap of the fs, to get files that have changed, as I'm wanting to 
export
the files for smb(win client ) usage.
>
> (1) create a virtual disk.
> (2) take the "old" snapshot.
> (3) write to lvdisk
> (4) take the "new" snapshot.
>
>
> At this stage the COW device of the "old" snapshot has all the data 
> that has changed up to and including the "new" snapshot. You can back 
> that up. As a differential. Then delete the "old" snapshot. The "new" 
> snapshot is now renamed to the old snapshot.
----
    Now here's a confusion -- back it up as a differential?  Do you
mean from a backup utility or going from some list of blocks that have 
changed?


>
> Take the next "new" snapshot. The renamed "old" snapshot has the 
> changes since the previous snapshot up to and including the latest 
> "new" snapshot. Just repeat this process, and you can do incremental 
> backups of your LVM disks.
----
    I'm sorta already doing the above -- it's just that I'm doing my 'diff'
with 'rsync' and it's dog-slow.  100-120 minutes for ~800GB resulting in
about 2.5G of diff.  Then I shuffle that off to another static vol sized for
the content -- and the 'cp' usually takes about 60-70 seconds.

    What's hurting me is that "incremental backup" by having to scan the 
file
system.
>
> The biggest issue with performance is the COW aspect of snapshots. I 
> have found using 64K chunk sizes greatly increase performance by 
> reducing COW to snapshots. The default size if 4K.
----
    I didn't know it was that low as a default -- but am using 64K 
already --
as that's my RAID's 'chunksize' (I thought about experimenting with 
larger sizes, but would like it to run in a reasonable time first.

    Also I a relevant question 0-- when I do a dmsetup list, I see a 
bunch of
cow volumes for drives that I **had** snaps going from at one point.  
Seems like
the COW volumes didn't go away when halted...though it looks like, from 
the dates, that maybe they get cleaned up at a boot(?)

I only have 1 snapshot going but I see 14 cow partitions....looking like

VG-Home (254, 3)
VG-Home--2012.09.30--00.52.54   (254, 50)
VG-Home--2012.09.30--00.52.54-cow       (254, 51)
VG-Home--2012.10.01--04.58.11   (254, 52)
VG-Home--2012.10.01--04.58.11-cow       (254, 53)
VG-Home--2012.10.02--07.22.14   (254, 54)
VG-Home--2012.10.02--07.22.14-cow       (254, 55)
VG-Home--2012.10.03--09.08.27   (254, 56)
VG-Home--2012.10.03--09.08.27-cow       (254, 57)
VG-Home-real    (254, 2)

So would those be the list of blocks that changed upto the point they
were halted?

Do I need to worry about those "cow" vols taking up space?