undupfs 0.1 - deduplicating layered filesystem

undupfs provides deduplicating storage. Files with overlapping content can be stored without wasting space on duplicated data. This can be particularly useful for storing multiple VM images, especially in a space-constrained environment like a laptop SSD. For example, 10 VMs with Debian installed can transparently share storage. Since deduplication trades off increased nonlocality of reference for decreased space consumption, it is especially well suited to SSD storage.

Contact and discussion

The undupfs mailing list is undupfs@lists.noisebridge.net; subscribe at https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/undupfs Github pull requests and issue submissions welcomed at https://github.com/radii/undupfs

Getting Started

0. Install fuse and its development prerequisites (sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev) and ensure that your user is permitted to mount new fuse filesystems (generally, give membership in the fuse group).

1. Build and install undupfs. This will put the binaries in /usr/local/bin.

    cd undupfs/src && make && sudo make install
   

2. Create a new undupfs filesystem.

    mkdir -p ~/.undup/vms ~/vms
    mkfs.undup ~/.undup/vms
   

3. Mount the new filesystem on the desired location. Depending on your application, using -o allow_other or -o allow_root may be required.

    undup-fuse ~/.undup/vms ~/vms
   

4. Move, copy, or write new files to the newly mounted undupfs filesystem.

5. When done, unmount the undupfs filesystem.

    fusermount -u ~/vms
   

Space Savings

Storing three 20GiB Debian VM images in an undupfs, with each VM containing a distinct set of installed packages, results in significant space savings:

% cp --sparse=always *.img /tmp/sparse
% cp -v --sparse=always *.img ~/vms
‘deb1.img’ -> ‘/home/adi/vms/deb1.img’
‘deb2.img’ -> ‘/home/adi/vms/deb2.img’
‘deb3.img’ -> ‘/home/adi/vms/deb3.img’
% du -sk ~/.undup/vms
6428448 /home/adi/.undup/vms
% (cd /tmp/sparse; du -skc *.img)
4880116 deb1.img
2311256 deb2.img
3035764 deb3.img
10227136        total

The undup backing store -- including block storage and metadata -- takes 6.2 GiB, while sparse copies of the source files take 9.8 GiB, giving a savings of 37% due to deduplication.

Performance

The performance of undupfs depends on the amount of data stored. With 5GB of unique data stored, undupfs 0.1 can accept writes at about 18 MB/sec on a 2.13 GHz Core i7 640L. With 10GB stored, the write speed drops to about 15 MB/sec.

Reading from undupfs runs at about 200 MB/sec on a fast SSD. Read performance does not change very much with amount of data stored.

Do not attempt to run undupfs on a spinning disk. Performance will be extremely poor.

Compatibility

The undupfs system will store any file type, but it is designed with a specific use case in mind: disk images from virtualization software. Any disk image format that maintains 4KiB alignment will enable deduplication.

kvm

undupfs is primarily tested using kvm and libvirt, virt-manager, and virt-viewer on Debian unstable, amd64, 3.8 and newer kernels. The raw disk image type works fine. Run undup-fuse with the -o allow_other option since Debian's libvirt has kvm run as a different user.

ii  qemu-kvm     1.1.2+dfsg-5 amd64 Full virtualization on x86 hardware
ii  virt-manager 0.9.4-2      all   desktop application for managing virtual mac
ii  virt-viewer  0.5.4-1      amd64 Displaying the graphical console of a virtua

qemu

Not tested, but should work since kvm uses qemu underpinnings. Both raw and qcow2 images should support deduplication.

virtualbox

Not tested, but should work. If you try it and it works, please get in touch!

Xen

Xen does not store VM images on a Linux filesystem, so Xen cannot use FUSE filesystems, so undupfs cannot help with Xen.

VMware Workstation/Player

Not tested, but should work. If you try it and it works, please get in touch! Some .vmdk files from older versions of VMware products may have non-4k-aligned guest partitions which will defeat deduplication, but modern images (created using 2008 or later releases of Workstation or Fusion) should be properly aligned.

Other hypervisors

Proprietary hypervisors such as VMware ESX/ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V do not store VM images on a Linux filesystem and cannot use FUSE, so undupfs cannot help with them.

Future Work

Features:

1. garbage collection.
2. online dedup of an existing folder.

Performance improvements:

1. partition blocks into multiple buckets for improved liveness probabilities.
2. "pivoted parallel Bloom filter test" to speed up Bloom queries.
3. hash lookaside cache to speed up clone-style workloads.

Release History

2013-06-29 undupfs 0.1

• initial release!