Performance

The Copy on Write (COW) method has some drawbacks:

However:

The performance of the filesystem depends on how much buffer cache is available, and on the frequency of the snapshots. Snapshots occur periodically (every 10 seconds, or as specified by the snapshot option to fs-qnx6.so), and also when you call sync() for the entire filesystem, or fsync() for a single file.

Note: Synchronization is at the filesystem level, not at that of individual files, so fsync() is potentially an expensive operation; the Power-Safe filesystem ignores the O_SYNC flag.

You can also turn snapshots off if you're doing some long operation, and the intermediate states aren't useful to you. For example, suppose you're copying a very large file into a Power-Safe filesystem. The cp utility is really just a sequence of basic operations:

If the file is big enough so that copying it spans snapshots, you have on-disk views that include the file not existing, the file existing at a variety of sizes, and finally the complete file copied and its IDs and permissions set:

Each snapshot is a valid point-in-time view of the filesystem (i.e., if you've copied 50 MB, the size is 50 MB, and all data up to 50 MB is also correctly copied and available). If there's a power failure, the filesystem is restored to the most recent snapshot. But the filesystem has no concept that the sequence of open(), write(), and close() operations is really one higher-level operation, cp. If you want the higher-level semantics, disable the snapshots around the cp, and then the middle snapshots won't happen, and if a power failure occurs, the file will either be complete, or not there at all.

For information about using this filesystem, see "Power-Safe filesystem" in the Working with Filesystems chapter of the QNX Neutrino User's Guide.