How We Are Using Btrfs To Find Regressions Incredibly Fast

“In previous articles I have hinted that at Phoronix we are
working to take advantage of the Btrfs file-system within the
Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic to provide an interesting
feature that will further expand our automated testing
capabilities, but how does this file-system come into play? Well,
here is what’s being worked on and it should be of terrific value
to many people.

“One of the features of Btrfs not found in other Linux
file-systems (like EXT4) is support for copy-on-write snapshots /
sub-volumes. With this Btrfs snapshotting support is the ability to
mount different snapshots in a very easy manner and since they are
copy-on-write, the disk storage requirements are not extreme. The
Btrfs snapshot ability is being taken advantage of by Red Hat to
provide Linux system rollback support whereby a Btrfs snapshot is
created before a yum/RPM transaction takes place and if the
installed package(s) wreak havoc on the system or something goes
awry, you can simply choose an earlier snapshot to set your
system’s software back to an earlier state following a system
reboot. We though are leveraging Btrfs snapshots in a different
manner.”

Complete Story