Ext3 users - Sep 2003 - ext3 hack: using the journal to replicate a filesystem

Hi,



	I'm looking for a way to use ext3 in the following
setup for experimentations purposes:

	I have a machine A, a machine B, one of which is
read-write, and machine B is read-only.

	I would want the machine B to be the exact copy
of machine A, automagically, like it would happen in an
SQL replication scheme.

	Is it possible to do with ext3, using the hidden
.journal file as a source for the machine B filesystem ?

	any feedback would be greatly appreciated.


Olivier Kaloudoff

Hi,

On Fri, 2003-09-19 at 14:20, Olivier Kaloudoff wrote:
> 	I'm looking for a way to use ext3 in the following
> setup for experimentations purposes:
> 
> 	I have a machine A, a machine B, one of which is
> read-write, and machine B is read-only.
> 
> 	I would want the machine B to be the exact copy
> of machine A, automagically, like it would happen in an
> SQL replication scheme.
> 
> 	Is it possible to do with ext3, using the hidden
> .journal file as a source for the machine B filesystem ?
Fundamentally, you need a clustered cache-coherency mechanism to achieve
this.  Otherwise, when machine A modifies data, there's no way for
machine B to know what has changed.

In other words, you don't just need to know _what_ has changed, you also
need to know _when_.

In theory, though, that could be piggy-backed on top of the ext3
replication mechanism.

A bigger problem would be that the Linux filesystem layer isn't used to
dealing with the fs changing beneath its feet dynamically.  Even a
readonly copy would be hard to keep totally consistent, as there are all
sorts of logical caching effects going on.  Linux doesn't cache data
based on physical disk blocks, it caches it based on file and offset;
and simply replaying a few on-disk disk blocks won't invalidate the file
contents in cache.

So for live filesystems, you need way more cache coherency than you can
achieve just with the journal.

Cheers,
 Stephen