XFS

From Free net encyclopedia

This article is about the XFS file system. XFS may also refer to the X Font Server or to the X-Fleet Sentinels.

XFS is a high-performance journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics for their IRIX operating system. In May 2000, Silicon Graphics released XFS under the GNU General Public License.

XFS has been merged into the mainline Linux 2.4 (as of 2.4.25, when Marcelo Tosatti judged it stable enough) and 2.6 kernels, making it almost universally available on Linux systems. Installation programs for the SuSE, Gentoo, Mandriva, Slackware, Ubuntu and Debian Linux distributions all offer XFS as a choice of filesystem. FreeBSD gained read-only support for XFS in December 2005.

1 Features
2 Disadvantages
3 See also
4 External links

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Features

It offers the following features:

Metadata-only journaling
Online resizing (growth only)
Striped allocation (maximizes throughput by aligning I/O with stripes on RAID devices)
Online defragmentation
A real-time I/O API (for hard or soft real-time applications, such as video streaming)
Allocate-on-flush (a scheme to reduce fragmentation by batching together allocations for slowly growing files)
Interface (DMAPI) to support Hierarchical Storage Management
Filesystem-specific backup and recovery tools (xfsdump and xfsrestore)

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Disadvantages

There is no way to shrink an XFS filesystem in-place.
Older versions of XFS suffered from out-of-order write hazards, which can result in problems such as files being appended to during a crash gaining a tail of garbage on the next mount.
Versions of the GRUB bootloader prior to 0.91 do not support XFS.
Recovering deleted files and such off an XFS filesystem is almost impossible

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