SGI has made available pre-release version 0.9 of its high-end XFS file system ported to Linux®. As a leading supporter of Linux and the open source movement, SGI is providing business-critical infrastructure for Linux through porting solid and high-performance software such as XFS to Linux and making it available to the community.
Existing file systems for Linux entail significant limitations in scalability and stability. Unlike other journaled file systems currently under development, XFS is a mature technology that has been proven on thousands of IRIX systems for over six years. It is widely recognized as the industry's leading high-performance file system. SGI has now optimized XFS for Linux users, providing the same flexible, high-capacity, and reliable file system that is available under IRIX. Features such as instantaneous recovery from disk crashes and the ability to support extremely large disk farms will establish XFS as the production quality file system for Linux. Furthermore, porting XFS to Linux is helping advance some of the Linux kernel infrastructure such as the VM subsystem and the block device interface.
Thanks to the extensive interest and contributions from the community, the XFS filesystem for Linux has made significant progress since its Beta release in September 2000. Although there are still some features to be finalized, the Beta code is currently stable in a majority of normal environments. We welcome and encourage interested users to try out the code aggressively in your test environments so that we can work through the final stage of the development and bug fixes to meet your production needs.
For links to articles on XFS and journaled filesystems, see XFS in the News.
SGI XFS Pre-release 0.9 is available as a patch against linux-2.4.0. It is also available as a set of RPMs and as a Modified Red Hat® 7.0 Installer which works with existing Red Hat 7.0 installation media to install a Red Hat 7.0 system with XFS on root, or any other partition, right out of the box.
Before installing the XFS filesystem for Linux, you should look over the XFS for Linux Pre-release 0.9 Caveats for a list of limitations, requirements, and special instructions for this release.
Step by step instructions are provided for the following installations:
Before you use the SGI XFS for Red Hat 7.0 Installer, you must look over the SGI XFS Filesystem 0.9 Pre-Release for Red Hat 7.0 Installer Caveats.