Matthew Dillon’s been working on “reliable on-media topology” for HAMMER2. If you had a crash at just the right time with HAMMER2, you wouldn’t lose data but you might have to do some manual cleanup. (Don’t ask me the steps; never happened to me.) With these changes, that doesn’t happen any more. It’s present now in -master and will be in what should be DragonFly 5.4.1 by the end of the year. He has a post to users@ that goes into better detail. If you want way too much detail, you can check the commits.
Three related notes: snapshots are now faster, the HAMMER2 design document has been updated to the tune of 400+ new lines, and yes, you can encrypt your root HAMMER2 filesystem, and have been able to for a while.
This is exciting news. Thank you for these developments and for reporting on them.
I wonder if someone might be able to share if there might soon be some kind of mirror-stream or similar support coming to H2 as in H1? That was THE killer feature of H1 and I’ve missed it very much. Just having the ability to add some redundancy to say a boot volume would be extremely helpful in many use cases.
If you look at the design document for HAMMER2, it doesn’t talk about streaming – the multimaster capability supersedes that. That’s great, cause that’s a powerful feature, but it’s hard to do.
Is this an update that can be seen by a rebuild of kernel and world or something that would require a reformat of the filesystem to fix the issue?
There hasn’t been any mention of the on-disk format changing, just how it gets put down to disk – so I don’t think there’s any reformat needed.