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Copy-on-write
Copy-on-write (COW), also called implicit sharing or shadowing, is a resource-management technique used in programming to manage shared data efficiently. Instead of copying data right away when multiple programs use it, the same data is shared between programs until one tries to modify it. If no changes are made, no private copy is created, saving resources. A copy is only made when needed, ensuring each program has its own version when modifications occur. This technique is commonly applied to memory, files, and data structures. In virtual memory management Copy-on-write finds its main use in operating systems, sharing the physical memory of computers running multiple processes, in the implementation of the fork() system call. Typically, the new process does not modify any memory and immediately executes a new process, replacing the address space entirely. It would waste processor time and memory to copy all of the old process's memory during the fork only to immediately dis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Btrfs
Btrfs (pronounced as "better F S", "butter F S", "b-tree F S", or "B.T.R.F.S.") is a computer storage format that combines a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle with a logical volume manager (distinct from Linux's LVM), developed together. It was created by Chris Mason in 2007 for use in Linux, and since November 2013, the file system's on-disk format has been declared stable in the Linux kernel. Btrfs is intended to address the lack of pooling, snapshots, integrity checking, data scrubbing, and integral multi-device spanning in Linux file systems. Mason, the principal Btrfs author, stated that its goal was "to let inuxscale for the storage that will be available. Scaling is not just about addressing the storage but also means being able to administer and to manage it with a clean interface that lets people see what's being used and makes it more reliable". History The core data structure of Btrfsthe copy-on-write B-treewas originally proposed by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Snapshot (computer Storage)
In Computer, computer systems, a snapshot is the State (computer science), state of a system at a particular point in time. The term was coined as an analogy to that in Snapshot (photography), photography. Rationale A full backup of a large data set may take a long time to complete. On Computer multitasking, multi-tasking or multi-user systems, there may be writes to that data while it is being backed up. This prevents the backup from being Atomicity (database systems), atomic and introduces a version skew that may result in data corruption. For example, if a user moves a file into a directory that has already been backed up, then that file would be completely missing on the Computer data storage, backup media, since the backup operation had already taken place before the addition of the file. Version skew may also cause corruption with files which change their size or contents underfoot while being read. One Backup#Approaches to backing up live data, approach to safely backin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logical Volume Management
In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes to store volumes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, stripe together or otherwise combine partitions (or block devices in general) into larger virtual partitions that administrators can re-size or move, potentially without interrupting system use. Volume management represents just one of many forms of storage virtualization; its implementation takes place in a layer in the device-driver stack of an operating system (OS) (as opposed to within storage devices or in a network). Design Most volume-manager implementations share the same basic design. They start with physical volumes (PVs), which can be either hard disks, hard disk partitions, or Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) of an external storage device. Volume management treats each PV as being composed of a sequence of chunks called ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
String (C++)
String or strings may refer to: *String (structure), a long flexible structure made from threads twisted together, which is used to tie, bind, or hang other objects Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''Strings'' (1991 film), a Canadian animated short * ''Strings'' (2004 film), a film directed by Anders Rønnow Klarlund * ''Strings'' (2011 film), an American dramatic thriller film * ''Strings'' (2012 film), a British film by Rob Savage * '' Bravetown'' (2015 film), an American drama film originally titled ''Strings'' * '' The String'' (2009), a French film Music Instruments * String (music), the flexible element that produces vibrations and sound in string instruments * String instrument, a musical instrument that produces sound through vibrating strings ** List of string instruments * String piano, a pianistic extended technique in which sound is produced by direct manipulation of the strings, rather than striking the piano's keys Types of groups * String band, music ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fork (system Call)
In computing, particularly in the context of the Unix operating system and Unix-like, its workalikes, fork is an operation whereby a Computer process, process creates a copy of itself. It is an interface which is required for compliance with the POSIX and Single UNIX Specification standards. It is usually implemented as a C standard library Wrapper library, wrapper to the fork, clone, or other system calls of the kernel (operating system), kernel. Fork is the primary method of process creation on Unix-like operating systems. Overview In multitasking operating systems, processes (running programs) need a way to create new processes, e.g. to run other programs. Fork and its variants are typically the only way of doing so in Unix-like systems. For a process to start the execution of a different program, it first forks to create a copy of itself. Then, the copy, called the "child process", makes any environment changes the child will need and then calls the exec (system call), exec s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ReFS
Resilient File System (ReFS), codenamed "Protogon", is a Microsoft proprietary file system introduced with Windows Server 2012 with the intent of becoming the "next generation" file system after NTFS. ReFS was designed to overcome problems that had become significant over the years since NTFS was conceived, which are related to how data storage requirements have changed. These requirements arose from two major changes in storage systems and usage – the size of storage in use ( large or massive arrays of multi-terabyte drives now common), and the need for continual reliability. As a result, the file system needs to be self-repairing (to prevent disk checking from being impractically slow or disruptive), along with abstraction or virtualization between physical disks and logical volumes. The key design advantages of ReFS include automatic integrity checking and data scrubbing, elimination of the need for running chkdsk, protection against data degradation, bui ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bcachefs
Bcachefs is a copy-on-write (COW) file system for Linux-based operating systems. Its primary developer, Kent Overstreet, first announced it in 2015, and it was added to the Linux kernel beginning with 6.7. It is intended to compete with the modern features of ZFS or Btrfs, and the speed and performance of ext4 or XFS. Features Bcachefs is a copy-on-write (COW) file system for Linux-based operating systems. Features include caching, full file-system encryption using the ChaCha20 and Poly1305 algorithms, native compression via LZ4, gzip and Zstandard, snapshots, CRC-32C and 64-bit checksumming. It can span block devices, including in RAID configurations. Earlier versions of Bcachefs provided all the functionality of Bcache, a block-layer cache system for Linux, with which Bcachefs shares about 80% of its code. As of December 2021, the block-layer cache functionality has been removed. On a data structure level, bcachefs uses B-trees like many other modern file systems, bu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kernel Same-page Merging
In computing, kernel same-page merging (KSM), also known as kernel shared memory, memory merging, memory deduplication, and page deduplication is a kernel feature that makes it possible for a hypervisor system to share memory pages that have identical contents between multiple processes or virtualized guests. While not directly linked, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) can use KSM to merge memory pages occupied by virtual machines. Deduplication KSM performs memory deduplication by scanning through main memory for physical pages that have identical content, and identifies the virtual pages that are mapped to those physical pages. It leaves one page unchanged, and re-maps each duplicate page to point to the same physical page, after which it releases the extra physical pages for re-use. It also marks both virtual pages as " copy-on-write" (COW), so that kernel will automatically remap a virtual page back to having its own separate physical page as soon as any process begins to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Page Table
A page table is a data structure used by a virtual memory system in a computer to store mappings between virtual addresses and physical addresses. Virtual addresses are used by the program executed by the accessing process, while physical addresses are used by the hardware, or more specifically, by the random-access memory (RAM) subsystem. The page table is a key component of virtual address translation that is necessary to access data in memory. The page table is set up by the computer's operating system, and may be read and written during the virtual address translation process by the memory management unit or by low-level system software or firmware. Role of the page table In operating systems that use virtual memory, every process is given the impression that it is working with large, contiguous sections of memory. Physically, the memory of each process may be dispersed across different areas of physical memory, or may have been moved ( paged out) to secondary storage ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Compare-and-swap
In computer science, compare-and-swap (CAS) is an atomic instruction used in multithreading to achieve synchronization. It compares the contents of a memory location with a given (the previous) value and, only if they are the same, modifies the contents of that memory location to a new given value. This is done as a single atomic operation. The atomicity guarantees that the new value is calculated based on up-to-date information; if the value had been updated by another thread in the meantime, the write would fail. The result of the operation must indicate whether it performed the substitution; this can be done either with a simple boolean response (this variant is often called compare-and-set), or by returning the value read from the memory location (''not'' the value written to it), thus "swapping" the read and written values. Overview A compare-and-swap operation is an atomic version of the following pseudocode, where denotes access through a pointer: function cas(p: poin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multithreading (computer Architecture)
In computer architecture, multithreading is the ability of a central processing unit (CPU) (or a single core in a multi-core processor) to provide multiple threads of execution. Overview The multithreading paradigm has become more popular as efforts to further exploit instruction-level parallelism have stalled since the late 1990s. This allowed the concept of throughput computing to re-emerge from the more specialized field of transaction processing. Even though it is very difficult to further speed up a single thread or single program, most computer systems are actually multitasking among multiple threads or programs. Thus, techniques that improve the throughput of all tasks result in overall performance gains. Two major techniques for throughput computing are ''multithreading'' and ''multiprocessing''. Advantages If a thread gets a lot of cache misses, the other threads can continue taking advantage of the unused computing resources, which may lead to faster overall exe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Resource Management (computing)
In computer programming, resource management refers to techniques for managing resources (components with limited availability). Computer programs may manage their own resources by using features exposed by programming languages ( is a survey article contrasting different approaches), or may elect to manage them by a host – an operating system or virtual machine – or another program. Host-based management is known as ''resource tracking,'' and consists of cleaning up resource leaks: terminating access to resources that have been acquired but not released after use. This is known as ''reclaiming'' resources, and is analogous to garbage collection for memory. On many systems, the operating system reclaims resources after the process makes the exit system call. Controlling access The omission of releasing a resource when a program has finished using it is known as a resource leak, and is an issue in sequential computing. Multiple processes wish to access a limited resource c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
