SGI XFS
XFS has long been the default filesystem for SGI’s IRIX operating system. It is a journaling filesystem designed with an eye toward performance and crash recovery. Since mid-2000, SGI developers have been working on a port of XFS for Linux. In May 2001, version 1.0 of XFS for Linux was released. Development continues, and version 1.1 is currently available.
Like the other filesystems covered in this chapter, XFS provides fast crash recovery through journaling. An XFS filesystem is divided into allocation groups not unlike the block groups used in ext2. Files, data, and free space within allocation groups are organized using B-trees. For a detailed overview of the XFS layout, refer to http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/design_docs/xfsdocs93_pdf/space_overview.pdf.
XFS has been time-proven on the IRIX operating systems. Given that history, XFS’s port to Linux is used by groups in the scientific community, such as Fermilab and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. One of Quantum’s NAS product lines is also based on XFS. So even though XFS is handicapped by its lack of inclusion in the standard Linux kernel and its lack of direct support across many Linux distributions, it is being used successfully in some high-demand projects.
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