On x86_64 systems, XFS supports a maximum file system size and maximum file size of nearly 8 EB. The maximum supported limit for XFS on Oracle Linux is 100 TB.

XFS implements journaling for metadata operations, which guarantees the consistency of the file system following loss of power or a system crash. XFS records file system updates asynchronously to a circular buffer (the journal) before it can commit the actual data updates to disk. The journal can be located either internally in the data section of the file system, or externally on a separate device to reduce contention for disk access. If the system crashes or loses power, it reads the journal when the file system is remounted, and replays any pending metadata operations to ensure the consistency of the file system. The speed of this recovery does not depend on the size of the file system.

XFS is internally partitioned into allocation groups, which are virtual storage regions of fixed size. Any files and directories that you create can span multiple allocation groups. Each allocation group manages its own set of inodes and free space independently of other allocation groups to provide both scalability and parallelism of I/O operations. If the file system spans many physical devices, allocation groups can optimize throughput by taking advantage of the underlying separation of channels to the storage components.

XFS is an extent-based file system. To reduce file fragmentation and file scattering, each file's blocks can have variable length extents, where each extent consists of one or more contiguous blocks. XFS's space allocation scheme is designed to efficiently locate free extents that it can use for file system operations. XFS does not allocate storage to the holes in sparse files. If possible, the extent allocation map for a file is stored in its inode. Large allocation maps are stored in a data structure maintained by the allocation group.

To maximize throughput for XFS file systems that you create on an underlying striped, software or hardware-based array, you can use the su and sw arguments to the -d option of the mkfs.xfs command to specify the size of each stripe unit and the number of units per stripe. XFS uses the information to align data, inodes, and journal appropriately for the storage. On lvm and md volumes and some hardware RAID configurations, XFS can automatically select the optimal stripe parameters for you.

To reduce fragmentation and increase performance, XFS implements delayed allocation, reserving file system blocks for data in the buffer cache, and allocating the block when the operating system flushes that data to disk.

XFS supports extended attributes for files, where the size of each attribute's value can be up to 64 KB, and each attribute can be allocated to either a root or a user name space.

Direct I/O in XFS implements high throughput, non-cached I/O by performing DMA directly between an application and a storage device, utilising the full I/O bandwidth of the device.

To support the snapshot facilities that volume managers, hardware subsystems, and databases provide, you can use the xfs_freeze command to suspend and resume I/O for an XFS file system. See Section 20.22, “Freezing and Unfreezing an XFS File System”.

To defragment individual files in an active XFS file system, you can use the xfs_fsr command. See Section 20.25, “Defragmenting an XFS File System”.

To grow an XFS file system, you can use the xfs_growfs command. See Section 20.21, “Growing an XFS File System”.

To back up and restore a live XFS file system, you can use the xfsdump and xfsrestore commands. See Section 20.24, “Backing up and Restoring XFS File Systems”.

XFS supports user, group, and project disk quotas on block and inode usage that are initialized when the file system is mounted. Project disk quotas allow you to set limits for individual directory hierarchies within an XFS file system without regard to which user or group has write access to that directory hierarchy.