Textbook of Linux

← Software

XFS

A high-performance journaling filesystem.

XFS is a 64-bit journaling filesystem that scales to multi-petabyte volumes and exabytes of storage. It excels at workloads with many large sequential writes — film production, scientific data collection, large database tables — and uses delayed allocation plus extents-based block layout to deliver consistently high throughput.

Silicon Graphics created XFS for IRIX in 1993 and ported it to Linux in 2000. SGI's bankruptcy did not end the filesystem; Red Hat picked up the maintenance burden, and XFS has been the default filesystem on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS since RHEL 7 (2014). Many enterprise Linux deployments thus run XFS without their administrators having explicitly chosen it.

XFS supports modern features through xfsprogs: reflinks (copy-on-write file copies for fast deduplication), shared metadata between snapshots, project quotas, real-time devices, and online resizing (grow only). It is one of the steadiest choices for "I want a no-surprises filesystem for a production server" — particularly when you know the workload involves large files.

Built into the Linux kernel; userspace tools:
  Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install xfsprogs
  Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install xfsprogs
  Arch:          sudo pacman -S xfsprogs