The problem#

For my recent posts on ZFS, I wanted to quickly try out a bunch of variants of my proposed operations without worrying about accidentally modifying my real ZFS filesystems. Specifically, I wanted to know which ways of copying files would result in more efficiently reusing blocks from existing snapshots where possible.

The solution#

WARNING: The instructions below will modify the ZFS pool tank, which is the default name used in many ZFS examples, and therefore may be a real ZFS pool on your computer.

I strongly recommend doing all of this inside a VM to be sure you are not affecting any real filesystems. I used a VirtualBox VM that I installed Debian on and used the guest additions to share a directory between the VM and my actual machine.

First create a 1 GiB virtual (i.e. in a file instead of a physical device) ZFS pool to run tests on:

fallocate -l 1G /root/tank
zpool create tank /root/tank

Then perform various filesystem operations and inspect the result of zfs list -o space to determine if they were using more (or less) space than you expect. In order to make sure I was being consistent and make it easier to test out multiple variations, I wrote some scripts:

git clone https://git.aweirdimagination.net/perelman/zfs-test.git
cd zfs-test/bin
# dump logs from create-/copy-all- and-measure into ../logs/
./measure-all
# read ../logs/ and print space used as Markdown table
./logs-to-table --links

The details#