XFS is an open source high-performance journaling filesystem that has been designed especially for GNU/Linux operating systems, combining full 64-bit addressing, algoritms and scalable structures with advanced journaling technology.
Features of the XFS filesystem
XFS major features include quick recovery, fast transactions, massive scalability, efficient allocations and excellent bandwidth. It provides users with a 64-bit, journaled file system that is consistent and reliable. It is a drop-in replacement fot the EXT file system.
In addition, XFS features online administration, quotas, extended attributes, POSIX ACLs (Access Control Lists), support for physical disk sector sizes, NFS compatibility, Windows compatibility, backup and restore functionality, support for hierarchical storage, as well as optional real-time allocator.
The xfsprogs utility
Believe it or not, xfsprogs is the only way to interact with a XFS filesystem under any GNU/Linux operating system. This means that, if you want to create a new XFS partition, you will have to install the “xfsprogs” package from the default software repositories of your Linux kernel-based operating system.
What’s included?
The xfsprogs package is comprised of several tools, including xfs_admin, xfs_bmap, xfs_check, xfs_copy, xfs_db, xfs_estimate, xfs_freeze, xfs_fsr, xfs_growfs, xfsinfo, xfs_info, xfs_io, xfs_logprint, xfs_mdrestore, xfs_metadump, xfs_mkfile, xfs_ncheck, xfs_quota, xfs_repair and xfs_rtcp.
They will allow you to do a wide range of operating on XFS partitions, from creating, copying and restoring partitions to checking their integrity and viewing detailed information about XFS filesystems. Additionally, you will be able to dump the metadata and repair broken XFS partitions.
Supported GNU/Linux distributions and achitectures
Despite the fact that the xfsprogs software is not installed by default on your GNU/Linux distribution, you can easily install it by using the universal sources archive provided on Softpedia, free of charge, or directly from the default software repos of your distro. Both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures are supported at this time.
