XFS and EXT

jeremy-leik

I was watching the Formatting and Mounting Disks episode in the Becoming a Linux System Admin series, and Don mentioned that XFS was the successor to Ext. I was curious if he misspoke, or if I was just not connecting something in my head. From a quick search, I found mention that XFS was first created by Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 1993 for its IRIX OS.

I just wanted to ask here in case there was a "different" XFS than the SGI developed one.

Thanks!

Ronnie Wong

@jeremy-leik,
After confirming with Don here's the info:

"It's the same file system created by SGI. It came out for IRIX in the 90's, but didn't make it to Linux until after 2000 because it was licensed commercial software. SGI put it under the GNU around 2000. Over the next decade, RedHat evaluated it and deemed it superior to EXT making it the new default in RHEL7."

"So, technically speaking, EXT and XFS are about the same age, but XFS is the "successor" in that it is replacing EXT for many installations."

jeremy-leik

Thanks Ronnie for the information! I very much appreciate it.

Ronnie Wong

@jeremy-leik,

No problem, always glad to clarify. Now if this was on a show that I was hosting, you probably would have pointed out a real error! ;)