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⇱ XFS Atomic Writes Support Merged For Linux 6.16 - Phoronix


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XFS Atomic Writes Support Merged For Linux 6.16

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 27 May 2025 at 07:53 AM EDT. 11 Comments
Building off the atomic write preparations that landed in prior Linux kernel versions, merged for the Linux 6.16 cycle is atomic write support for the XFS file-system.

Merged yesterday to Linux Git was the XFS support for atomic writes. Oracle engineer John Garry who worked on the XFS atomic write support explained in the earlier patch series for this feature:
"Currently atomic write support for xfs is limited to writing a single block as we have no way to guarantee alignment and that the write covers a single extent.

This series introduces a method to issue atomic writes via a software-based method.

The software-based method is used as a fallback for when attempting to issue an atomic write over misaligned or multiple extents.

For xfs, this support is based on reflink CoW support.

The basic idea of this CoW method is to alloc a range in the CoW fork, write the data, and atomically update the mapping.

Initial mysql performance testing has shown this method to perform ok. However, there we are only using 16K atomic writes (and 4K block size), so typically - and thankfully - this software fallback method won't be used often."

The XFS file-system updates for Linux 6.16 also remove the experimental warnings on the pNFS, scrub and parent pointers features.

More details on these XFS feature updates for Linux 6.16 via this pull.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.