XFS Papers and Documentation

Primary XFS Documentation

The XFS documentation started by SGI has been converted to docbook/Publican format. The material is suitable for experienced users as well as developers and support staff. The XML source is available in a git repository and builds of the documentation are available here:

• XFS User Guide

• XFS File System Structure
  • Japanese translation is also available.

• XFS Training Labs

• (Original versions of this material are still available at XFS Overview and Internals (html) and XFS Filesystem Structure (pdf)

The format of /proc/fs/xfs/stat also has been documented:

• Runtime_Stats

Papers, Presentations, Etc

• Video "Recent and Future Adventures in Filesystem Scalability" - Dave Chinner

The October 2009 issue of the USENIX ;login: magazine published an article about XFS targeted at system administrators:

• XFS: The big storage file system for Linux [pdf]

At the Ottawa Linux Symposium (July 2006), Dave Chinner presented a paper on filesystem scalability in Linux 2.6 kernels:

• High Bandwidth Filesystems on Large Systems (July 2006) [paper] [presentation]

At linux.conf.au 2008 Dave Chinner gave a presentation about xfs_repair that he co-authored with Barry Naujok:

• Fixing XFS Filesystems Faster [pdf]

In July 2006, SGI storage marketing updated the XFS datasheet:

• Open Source XFS for Linux [pdf]

At UKUUG 2003, Christoph Hellwig presented a talk on XFS:

• XFS for Linux (July 2003) [pdf] [html]

Originally published in Proceedings of the FREENIX Track: 2002 Usenix Annual Technical Conference:

• Filesystem Performance and Scalability in Linux 2.4.17 (June 2002) [pdf]

At the Ottawa Linux Symposium, an updated presentation on porting XFS to Linux was given:

• Porting XFS to Linux (July 2000) [html]

At the Atlanta Linux Showcase, SGI presented the following paper on the port of XFS to Linux:

• Porting the SGI XFS File System to Linux (October 1999) [ps] [pdf]

At the 6th Linux Kongress & the Linux Storage Management Workshop (LSMW) in Germany in September, 1999, SGI had a few presentations including the following:

• SGI's port of XFS to Linux (September 1999) [html]
• Overview of DMF (September 1999) [html]

At the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in August 1999, SGI published:

• An Open Source XFS data sheet (August 1999) [pdf]

From the 1996 USENIX conference:

• An XFS white paper [html]

Other historical articles, press-releases, etc

• IBM's Advanced Filesystem Implementor's Guide has a chapter Introducing XFS [html]

• An editorial titled Tired of fscking? Try a journaling filesystem!, Freshmeat (February 2001) [html]

• Who give a fsck about filesystems provides an overview of the Linux 2.4 filesystems [html]

• Journal File Systems in issue 55 of Linux Gazette provides a comparison of journaled filesystems.

• The original XFS beta release announcement was published in Linux Today (September 2000) [html]

• XFS: It's worth the wait was published on EarthWeb (July 2000) [html]

• An IRIX-XFS data sheet (July 1999) [pdf]

• The Getting Started with XFS book (1994) [pdf]

• Original XFS design documents (1993) (ps, pdf)