allocation strategy it uses significantly improves the file system's resistance to fragmentation problems, XFS provides a filesystem defragmentation utility (xfs_fsr, short for XFS filesystem reorganizer) that can defragment the files on a mounted and active XFS filesystem. Online growth XFS provides the xfs_growfs utility to perform online expansion of XFS file systems. XFS filesystems can be grown so long as there is remaining unallocated space on the device holding the filesystem. This feature is typically used in conjunction with volume management, as otherwise the partition holding the filesystem will need enlarging separately. Disadvantages XFS filesystems cannot () be shrunk in place, although several possible workarounds have been discussed. Metadata operations in XFS were slower compared to journaling file systems implemented later and designed to work with much larger logs resulting in, for example, slower performance with operations such as deletions of large numbers of files. However, a new XFS feature implemented by John Nelson and called delayed logging, available since version 2.6.39 of the Linux kernel mainline, is said to resolve this; performance benchmarks done by the developer in 2010 revealed performance levels to be similar to ext4 at low thread counts, and superior at high thread counts. Journaling cannot be disabled. However, XFS can write to an external journal on a separate block device instead. See also Comparison of file systems CXFS List of file systems Stratis (configuration daemon) References Further reading Scalability in the XFS Filesystem (First XFS paper presented at the Usenix 1996 Annual Technical Conference) External links The XFS Linux wiki, current community wiki XFS.org, old community wiki crossmeta.org, community port of XFS on Windows 1994 software Disk file systems File systems supported by the Linux kernel Formerly proprietary software IRIX