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xfs(5)                                   File Formats Manual                                  xfs(5)



NAME
       xfs - layout, mount options, and supported file attributes for the XFS filesystem

DESCRIPTION
       An  XFS  filesystem  can  reside  on a regular disk partition or on a logical volume.  An XFS
       filesystem has up to three parts: a data section, a log section, and a realtime section.  Us‐
       ing the default mkfs.xfs(8) options, the realtime section is absent, and the log area is con‐
       tained within the data section.  The log section can be either separate from the data section
       or contained within it.  The filesystem sections are divided into a certain number of blocks,
       whose size is specified at mkfs.xfs(8) time with the -b option.

       The data section contains all the filesystem metadata (inodes, directories, indirect  blocks)
       as  well  as the user file data for ordinary (non-realtime) files and the log area if the log
       is internal to the data section.  The data section is divided into  a  number  of  allocation
       groups.  The number and size of the allocation groups are chosen by mkfs.xfs(8) so that there
       is normally a small number of equal-sized groups.  The number of allocation  groups  controls
       the  amount  of  parallelism  available in file and block allocation.  It should be increased
       from the default if there is sufficient memory and a lot of allocation activity.  The  number
       of  allocation  groups should not be set very high, since this can cause large amounts of CPU
       time to be used by the filesystem, especially when the filesystem is nearly full.  More allo‐
       cation groups are added (of the original size) when xfs_growfs(8) is run.

       The  log section (or area, if it is internal to the data section) is used to store changes to
       filesystem metadata while the filesystem is running until those changes are made to the  data
       section.   It  is  written  sequentially  during normal operation and read only during mount.
       When mounting a filesystem after a crash, the log is read to complete operations that were in
       progress at the time of the crash.

       The  realtime section is used to store the data of realtime files.  These files had an attri‐
       bute bit set through xfsctl(3) after file creation, before any data was written to the  file.
       The  realtime  section  is  divided  into  a  number  of  extents of fixed size (specified at
       mkfs.xfs(8) time).  Each file in the realtime section has an extent size that is  a  multiple
       of the realtime section extent size.

       Each  allocation  group  contains several data structures.  The first sector contains the su‐
       perblock.  For allocation groups after the first, the superblock is just a copy  and  is  not
       updated  after  mkfs.xfs(8).   The next three sectors contain information for block and inode
       allocation within the allocation group.  Also contained within each allocation group are data
       structures to locate free blocks and inodes; these are located through the header structures.

       Each XFS filesystem is labeled with a Universal Unique Identifier (UUID).  The UUID is stored
       in every allocation group header and is used to help distinguish one XFS filesystem from  an‐
       other,  therefore  you  should  avoid using dd(1) or other block-by-block copying programs to
       copy XFS filesystems.  If two XFS filesystems on the same machine have the  same  UUID,  xfs‐‐
       dump(8)  may become confused when doing incremental and resumed dumps.  xfsdump(8) and xfsre‐‐
       store(8) are recommended for making copies of XFS filesystems.

OPERATIONS
       Some functionality specific to the XFS filesystem is accessible to applications  through  the
       xfsctl(3) and by-handle (see open_by_handle(3)) interfaces.

MOUNT OPTIONS
       The  following  XFS-specific mount options may be used when mounting an XFS filesystem. Other
       generic options may be used as well; refer to the mount(8) manual page for more details.

       allocsize=size
              Sets the buffered I/O end-of-file preallocation size  when  doing  delayed  allocation
              writeout. Valid values for this option are page size (typically 4KiB) through to 1GiB,
              inclusive, in power-of-2 increments.

              The default behavior is for dynamic end-of-file preallocation size, which uses  a  set
              of  heuristics to optimise the preallocation size based on the current allocation pat‐
              terns within the file and the access patterns to the file. Specifying a  fixed  alloc‐
              size value turns off the dynamic behavior.

       attr2|noattr2
              Note:  These  options have been deprecated as of kernel v5.10; The noattr2 option will
              be removed no earlier than in September 2025 and attr2 option will  be  immutable  de‐
              fault.

              The options enable/disable an "opportunistic" improvement to be made in the way inline
              extended attributes are stored on-disk.  When the new form is used for the first  time
              when  attr2  is selected (either when setting or removing extended attributes) the on-
              disk superblock feature bit field will be updated to reflect this format being in use.

              The default behavior is determined by the on-disk feature bit  indicating  that  attr2
              behavior  is  active. If either mount option it set, then that becomes the new default
              used by the filesystem.

              CRC enabled filesystems always use the attr2 format, and so will  reject  the  noattr2
              mount option if it is set.

       dax=value
              Set CPU direct access (DAX) behavior for the current filesystem. This mount option ac‐
              cepts the following values:

              "dax=inode" DAX will be enabled only on regular files with FS_XFLAG_DAX applied.

              "dax=never" DAX will not be enabled for any files. FS_XFLAG_DAX will be ignored.

              "dax=always" DAX will be enabled for all regular files, regardless of the FS_XFLAG_DAX
              state.

              If  no  option  is  used  when  mounting  a filesystem stored on a DAX capable device,
              dax=inode will be used as default.

              For details regarding DAX behavior in kernel, please refer to  kernel's  documentation
              at filesystems/dax.txt

       discard|nodiscard
              Enable/disable  the issuing of commands to let the block device reclaim space freed by
              the filesystem.  This is useful for SSD devices, thinly provisioned LUNs  and  virtual
              machine images, but may have a performance impact.

              Note:  It  is currently recommended that you use the fstrim application to discard un‐
              used blocks rather than the discard mount option because  the  performance  impact  of
              this option is quite severe.  For this reason, nodiscard is the default.

       grpid|bsdgroups|nogrpid|sysvgroups
              These  options  define what group ID a newly created file gets.  When grpid is set, it
              takes the group ID of the directory in which it is created; otherwise it takes the fs‐
              gid of the current process, unless the directory has the setgid bit set, in which case
              it takes the gid from the parent directory, and also gets the setgid bit set if it  is
              a directory itself.

       filestreams
              Make the data allocator use the filestreams allocation mode across the entire filesys‐
              tem rather than just on directories configured to use it.

       ikeep|noikeep
              Note: These options have been deprecated as of kernel v5.10; The noikeep  option  will
              be  removed  no  earlier than in September 2025 and ikeep option will be immutable de‐
              fault.


              When ikeep is specified, XFS does not delete  empty  inode  clusters  and  keeps  them
              around  on  disk.  When noikeep is specified, empty inode clusters are returned to the
              free space pool.  noikeep is the default.

       inode32|inode64
              When inode32 is specified, it indicates that XFS limits inode  creation  to  locations
              which will not result in inode numbers with more than 32 bits of significance.

              When  inode64  is  specified, it indicates that XFS is allowed to create inodes at any
              location in the filesystem, including those which will result in inode numbers occupy‐
              ing more than 32 bits of significance.

              inode32  is  provided for backwards compatibility with older systems and applications,
              since 64 bits inode numbers might cause problems for  some  applications  that  cannot
              handle large inode numbers.  If applications are in use which do not handle inode num‐
              bers bigger than 32 bits, the inode32 option should be specified.

              For kernel v3.7 and later, inode64 is the default.

       largeio|nolargeio
              If "nolargeio" is specified, the optimal I/O reported in st_blksize by stat(2) will be
              as small as possible to allow user applications to avoid inefficient read/modify/write
              I/O.  This is typically the page size of the machine, as this is  the  granularity  of
              the page cache.

              If  "largeio"  specified, a filesystem that was created with a "swidth" specified will
              return the "swidth" value (in bytes) in st_blksize. If the filesystem does not have  a
              "swidth" specified but does specify an "allocsize" then "allocsize" (in bytes) will be
              returned instead. Otherwise the behavior is the same as if "nolargeio" was  specified.
              nolargeio is the default.

       logbufs=value
              Set the number of in-memory log buffers.  Valid numbers range from 2–8 inclusive.

              The default value is 8 buffers.

              If  the  memory cost of 8 log buffers is too high on small systems, then it may be re‐
              duced at some cost to performance on metadata intensive workloads. The logbsize option
              below controls the size of each buffer and so is also relevant to this case.

       logbsize=value
              Set  the size of each in-memory log buffer.  The size may be specified in bytes, or in
              kibibytes (KiB) with a "k" suffix.  Valid sizes for version 1 and version 2  logs  are
              16384  (value=16k) and 32768 (value=32k).  Valid sizes for version 2 logs also include
              65536 (value=64k), 131072 (value=128k) and 262144 (value=256k). The logbsize  must  be
              an integer multiple of the log stripe unit configured at mkfs time.

              The  default  value for version 1 logs is 32768, while the default value for version 2
              logs is max(32768, log_sunit).

       logdev=device and rtdev=device
              Use an external log (metadata journal) and/or real-time device.  An XFS filesystem has
              up  to three parts: a data section, a log section, and a real-time section.  The real-
              time section is optional, and the log section can be separate from the data section or
              contained within it.

       noalign
              Data  allocations will not be aligned at stripe unit boundaries. This is only relevant
              to filesystems created with non-zero data  alignment  parameters  (sunit,  swidth)  by
              mkfs.

       norecovery
              The  filesystem  will  be mounted without running log recovery.  If the filesystem was
              not cleanly unmounted, it is likely to be inconsistent when  mounted  in  "norecovery"
              mode.   Some  files or directories may not be accessible because of this.  Filesystems
              mounted "norecovery" must be mounted read-only or the mount will fail.

       nouuid Don't check for double mounted file systems using the file system uuid.  This is  use‐
              ful to mount LVM snapshot volumes, and often used in combination with "norecovery" for
              mounting read-only snapshots.

       noquota
              Forcibly turns off all quota accounting and enforcement within the filesystem.

       uquota/usrquota/quota/uqnoenforce/qnoenforce
              User disk quota accounting  enabled,  and  limits  (optionally)  enforced.   Refer  to
              xfs_quota(8) for further details.

       gquota/grpquota/gqnoenforce
              Group  disk  quota  accounting  enabled  and  limits  (optionally) enforced.  Refer to
              xfs_quota(8) for further details.

       pquota/prjquota/pqnoenforce
              Project disk quota accounting enabled and  limits  (optionally)  enforced.   Refer  to
              xfs_quota(8) for further details.

       sunit=value and swidth=value
              Used  to  specify  the  stripe  unit  and  width for a RAID device or a stripe volume.
              "value" must be specified in 512-byte block units. These options are only relevant  to
              filesystems that were created with non-zero data alignment parameters.

              The  sunit  and  swidth  parameters  specified  must  be  compatible with the existing
              filesystem alignment characteristics.  In general, that means the only  valid  changes
              to sunit are increasing it by a power-of-2 multiple. Valid swidth values are any inte‐
              ger multiple of a valid sunit value.

              Typically the only time these mount options are necessary if after an underlying  RAID
              device  has  had  it's geometry modified, such as adding a new disk to a RAID5 lun and
              reshaping it.

       swalloc
              Data allocations will be rounded up to stripe width boundaries when the current end of
              file is being extended and the file size is larger than the stripe width size.

       wsync  When  specified,  all filesystem namespace operations are executed synchronously. This
              ensures that when the namespace operation (create, unlink, etc) completes, the  change
              to the namespace is on stable storage. This is useful in HA setups where failover must
              not result in clients seeing inconsistent namespace presentation  during  or  after  a
              failover event.

REMOVED MOUNT OPTIONS
       The  following mount options have been removed from the kernel, and will yield mount failures
       if specified.  Mount options are deprecated for a significant period time prior to removal.

       Name                        Removed
       ----                        -------
       delaylog/nodelaylog         v4.0
       ihashsize                   v4.0
       irixsgid                    v4.0
       osyncisdsync/osyncisosync   v4.0
       barrier/nobarrier           v4.19

FILE ATTRIBUTES
       The XFS filesystem supports setting the following file attributes on Linux systems using  the
       chattr(1) utility:

       a - append only

       A - no atime updates

       d - no dump

       i - immutable

       S - synchronous updates

       For descriptions of these attribute flags, please refer to the chattr(1) man page.

SEE ALSO
       chattr(1),  xfsctl(3),  mount(8),  mkfs.xfs(8), xfs_info(8), xfs_admin(8), xfsdump(8), xfsre‐‐
       store(8).



                                                                                              xfs(5)
xfs(5)
NAME DESCRIPTION OPERATIONS MOUNT OPTIONS
allocsize=size dax=value filestreams logbufs=value logbsize=value noalign norecovery noquota uquota/usrquota/quota/uqnoenforce/qnoenforce gquota/grpquota/gqnoenforce pquota/prjquota/pqnoenforce swalloc
REMOVED MOUNT OPTIONS FILE ATTRIBUTES SEE ALSO

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