XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993.[8] It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating system starting with its version 5.3. XFS was ported to the Linux kernel in 2001; as of June 2014, XFS is supported by most Linux distributions; Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses it as default filesystem.
XFS excels in the execution of parallel input/output (I/O) operations due to its design, which is based on allocation groups (a type of subdivision of the physical volumes in which XFS is used- also shortened to AGs). Because of this, XFS enables extreme scalability of I/O threads, file system bandwidth, and size of files and of the file system itself when spanning multiple physical storage devices. XFS ensures the consistency of data by employing metadata journaling and supporting write barriers. Space allocation is performed via extents with data structures stored in B+ trees, improving the overall performance of the file system, especially when handling large files. Delayed allocation assists in the prevention of file system fragmentation; online defragmentation is also supported. A feature unique to XFS is the pre-allocation of I/O bandwidth at a pre-determined rate; this is suitable for many real-time applications. However, this feature was supported only on IRIX, and only with specialized hardware.
Silicon Graphics began development of XFS[9] ("X" was meant to be filled in later but never was) in 1993.
The file system was released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in May 2000. A team led by Steve Lord at SGI ported it to Linux,[10] and first support by a Linux distribution came in 2001. This support gradually became available in almost all Linux distributions.[citation needed]
Initial support for XFS in the Linux kernel came through patches from SGI. It merged into the Linux kernel mainline for the 2.6 series, and separately merged in February 2004 into the 2.4 series in version 2.4.25,[11] making XFS almost universally available on Linux systems.[12] Gentoo Linux became the first Linux distribution to introduce an option for XFS as the default filesystem in mid-2002.[13]
FreeBSD added read-only support for XFS in December 2005, and in June 2006 introduced experimental write support. However, this was intended only as an aid in migration from Linux, not as a "main" file system. FreeBSD 10 removed support for XFS.[7]