As part of our Server Management Services, we assist our customers with similar queries.

Today, let us see how our Support techs perform this.

How to create and mount an XFS file system on Linux?

XFS is a high-performance file system which was design by SGI for their IRIX platform.

XFS has a number of unique features that make it stand out among the file system crowd, such as scalable/parallel I/O, journaling for metadata operations, online defragmentation, suspend/resume I/O, delayed allocation for performance, etc.

Today, let us see the steps followed by our Support Techs to create and mount an XFS file system.

Install XFS System Utilities

Firstly, you need to install XFS system utilities, which allow you to perform various XFS related administration tasks.

Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint:

$ sudo apt-get install xfsprogs

Fedora, CentOS or RHEL:

$ sudo yum install xfsprogs

Arch Linux:

$ sudo pacman -S xfsprogs

Create an XFS-Formatted Disk Partition

Now let’s first prepare a disk partition to create XFS on.

Assuming that your disk is locate at /dev/sdb, create a partition by:

$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

Let’s say the created partition is assigned /dev/sdb1 device name.

Next, format the partition as XFS using mkfs.xfs command.

The -f option is needed if the partition has any other file system created on it, and you want to overwrite it.

$ sudo mkfs.xfs -f /dev/sdb1

Now you are ready to mount the formatted partition. Let’s assume that /storage is a local mount point for XFS.

Go ahead and mount the partition by running:

$ sudo mount -t xfs /dev/sdb1 /storage

Verify that XFS mount is succesful by running:

$ df -Th /storage

If you want the XFS partition to mount at /storage automatically upon boot, add the following line to /etc/fstab.

/dev/sdb1 /storage xfs defaults 0 0