XFS Expanding Its Online Repair Capabilities In Linux 6.10

The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.

For several years now the XFS file-system has been working toward online repair functionality and hoped to get it ready for 2023. Over the course of the past year XFS online repair began landing and it's still an ongoing affair but at least steady progress is being made.

For XFS in Linux 6.10 the online repair code now supports atomic file content exchanges to exchange ranges of bytes between two files atomically. The XFS online repair also now supports creating temporary files to repair file-based metadata and the ability to repair more data structures like extended attributes, directories, symbolic links, parent pointers, inode unlinked state, and more. XFS online repair can also now move orphan files to the lost and found directory, a new sub-AG FITRIM implementation, and other improvements.

Aside from the ongoing online repair bring-up, XFS in Linux 6.10 also includes a new parent pointer extended attribute for inodes, bringing back delalloc support for real-time devices, and improving the performance of the log incompat feature handling. XFS can now handle delayed allocation for real-time devices where the extent size matches the file-system's block size.

More details on these XFS changes plus more fixes and code clean-ups via this Git merge.