EarthWeb: XFS: It's worth the wait Jul 31, 2000, 23 :20 UTC (6 Talkback[s]) (7935 reads) (Other stories by Vincent Danen)
"In 1994, Silicon
Graphics Inc., of
Mountain View, Calif.,
(SGI) released a new
journaled file system
on IRIX, the
company's System
V-based version of
UNIX. This advanced file system, called XFS,
replaced SGI's old EFS (Extent File System) file
system, which was designed similar to the Berkeley
Fast File System. Coordinating with many other
kernel developers, SGI is currently working to tightly
integrate the XFS file system with the Linux
operating system so that we can take advantage of
the many benefits of XFS over the current ext2 file
system. This article discusses XFS and its technical
specifications."
"XFS uses B+ trees extensively in place of the
traditional linear file system structure. B+ trees use
a highly efficient indexing method to index directory
entries, manage file extents, locate free space, and
keep track of the locations of file index information.
As a result, reading file systems and retrieving
information from them happens quickly--without
using large amounts of system resources."
"Currently, the XFS team is developing
enhancements to the Linux page cache so XFS can
be tightly integrated with the Linux kernel. This
work is being done so XFS relies solely on the page
cache to store both file data and file system
metadata. This work can also be used to enhance
other file systems to improve overall system
performance, because it is being developed at a
kernel level. These features will most likely be
unavailable until Linux 2.5, except as a part of XFS
itself."
