Microsoft's Linux Distribution Finally Adds Support For XFS Root File-Systems

While many Linux distributions look at Btrfs or F2FS when evaluating new root file-system options or even something like OpenZFS, in the case of Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution only this month have they even gotten to supporting XFS as a root file-system option.

With this month's update to Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution, CBL-Mariner, they now support XFS as a root file-system. Up to this point this Linux distribution used for various purposes within Microsoft has been focused on using EXT4 as the root file-system, but with today's release of CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230426 they now honor XFS too.

CBL-Mariner has been quite limited in its root file-system support options with basically EXT4, but now XFS can work too.

The interest in XFS root file-system support for CBL-Mariner appears to originate at least in part within the LinkedIn organization at Microsoft.

Since March there has been Microsoft engineers working on this ticket for adding XFS support to the CBL-Mariner installer, fsck.xfs for the initrd, and XFS module for GRUB in order to allow this as a root file-system alternative.

In addition to now supporting XFS as a root file-system, today's CBL-Mariner update enables serial console support for the ISO installer, adds LLVM and Clang 16 packages, shifts to a newer Linux 5.15 LTS kernel point release, and has updates to a number of packages -- including various security fixes.

Downloads and more details on this month's Microsoft CBL-Mariner 2.0 release via GitHub.