Porting the SGI XFS File System to Linux

Overview

This paper outlines the history of XFS, its current architecture and implementation, the porting strategy for migrating XFS to Linux, and future plans, including coordinating the work with the Linux hacker community. Applications in film and video, supercomputing, and huge databases all required performance and capacities beyond what EFS, with a design similar to the Berkeley Fast File System; could provide. EFS limitations were similar to those found recently in Linux file systems: small file system sizes (8 gigabytes), small file sizes (2 gigabytes), and slow recovery times using fsck.