=== Enabling Snapshots on Filesystems Using Journaled Soft Updates

Links: +
link:https://reviews.freebsd.org/D36491[Milestone 1 Core Changes] URL: link:https://reviews.freebsd.org/D36491[https://reviews.freebsd.org/D36491]

Contact: Kirk McKusick <mckusick@FreeBSD.org>

This project will make UFS/FFS filesystem snapshots available when running with journaled soft updates.

The UFS/FFS filesystem has the ability to take snapshots.
Because the taking of snapshots was added after soft updates were written they were fully integrated with soft updates.
When journaled soft updates were added in 2010, they were never integrated with snapshots.
So snapshots cannot be used on filesystems running with journaled soft updates.

Snapshots became less important with the support for ZFS on FreeBSD since ZFS can take snapshots quickly and easily.
However there remain two instances where UFS snapshots are still important.
The first is that they allow reliable dumps of live filesystems which avoids possibly hours of down time.
The second is that they allow the running of background fsck.
Similar to the need for scrub in ZFS, fsck needs to be run periodically to find undetected disk failures.
Snapshots allow fsck to be run on live filesystems rather than needing to schedule down time to run it.

This project has two milestones:

1. enable snapshots when running with journaled soft updates and ensure that they can be used for doing background dumps on a live filesystem.
This milestone should be completed by the end of 2022.

2. extend fsck_ffs to be able to do a background check using a snapshot on a filesystem running with journaled soft updates.
This milestone is expected by Q3 of 2023.

Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation