rustup Toolchain

We normally want to build with the rustc Debian package. To do that you can set the following rustup configuration:

# rustup toolchain link system /usr # rustup default system

Versioning of proxmox helper crates

To use current git master code of the proxmox* helper crates, add:

git = "git://git.proxmox.com/git/proxmox"

or:

path = "../proxmox/proxmox"

to the proxmox dependency, and update the version to reflect the current, pre-release version number (e.g., "0.1.1-dev.1" instead of "0.1.0").

Local cargo config

This repository ships with a .cargo/config that replaces the crates.io registry with packaged crates located in /usr/share/cargo/registry.

A similar config is also applied building with dh_cargo. Cargo.lock needs to be deleted when switching between packaged crates and crates.io, since the checksums are not compatible.

To reference new dependencies (or updated versions) that are not yet packaged, the dependency needs to point directly to a path or git source (e.g., see example for proxmox crate above).

Build

on Debian Buster

Setup:

1. # echo 'deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/devel/ buster main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/proxmox-devel.list
2. # sudo wget http://download.proxmox.com/debian/proxmox-ve-release-6.x.gpg -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/proxmox-ve-release-6.x.gpg
3. # sudo apt update
4. # sudo apt install devscripts debcargo clang
5. # git clone git://git.proxmox.com/git/proxmox-backup.git
6. # sudo mk-build-deps -ir

Note: 2. may be skipped if you already added the PVE or PBS package repository

You are now able to build using the Makefile or cargo itself.

Design Notes

Here are some random thought about the software design (unless I find a better place).

Large chunk sizes

It is important to notice that large chunk sizes are crucial for performance. We have a multi-user system, where different people can do different operations on a datastore at the same time, and most operation involves reading a series of chunks.

So what is the maximal theoretical speed we can get when reading a series of chunks? Reading a chunk sequence need the following steps:

• seek to the first chunk start location
• read the chunk data
• seek to the first chunk start location
• read the chunk data
• ...

Lets use the following disk performance metrics:

AST:	Average Seek Time (second)
MRS:	Maximum sequential Read Speed (bytes/second)
ACS:	Average Chunk Size (bytes)

The maximum performance you can get is:

MAX(ACS) = ACS /(AST + ACS/MRS)

Please note that chunk data is likely to be sequential arranged on disk, but this it is sort of a best case assumption.

For a typical rotational disk, we assume the following values:

AST: 10ms
MRS: 170MB/s

MAX(4MB)  = 115.37 MB/s
MAX(1MB)  =  61.85 MB/s;
MAX(64KB) =   6.02 MB/s;
MAX(4KB)  =   0.39 MB/s;
MAX(1KB)  =   0.10 MB/s;

Modern SSD are much faster, lets assume the following:

max IOPS: 20000 => AST = 0.00005
MRS: 500Mb/s

MAX(4MB)  = 474 MB/s
MAX(1MB)  = 465 MB/s;
MAX(64KB) = 354 MB/s;
MAX(4KB)  =  67 MB/s;
MAX(1KB)  =  18 MB/s;

Also, the average chunk directly relates to the number of chunks produced by a backup:

CHUNK_COUNT = BACKUP_SIZE / ACS

Here are some staticics from my developer worstation:

Disk Usage:       65 GB
Directories:   58971
Files:        726314
Files < 64KB: 617541

As you see, there are really many small files. If we would do file level deduplication, i.e. generate one chunk per file, we end up with more than 700000 chunks.

Instead, our current algorithm only produce large chunks with an average chunks size of 4MB. With above data, this produce about 15000 chunks (factor 50 less chunks).