Failure Analysis of SGI XFS File System

Commodity file systems expect a fail stop disk. But to-days disks fail in unexpected ways. Disks exhibit latent sector errors, silent corruption and transient failures to name a few. In this paper the authors study the behavior of SGI XFS to such errors. File systems play a key role in handling most data and hence the failure handling policy of the file system plays a major role in ensuring the integrity of the data. XFS is a highly scalable journaling file system developed by SGI. They analyze the failure handling policy of XFS file system. They fail reads and writes of various blocks that originate from the file system and analyze the file system behavior.