TBNTech
Announcing XRAID: declustered parity RAID for zoned XFS
Publication: LWN.net
Author: jzb
Source published: 13/11/2026, 14:39:47 UTC
Briefing created: 13/11/2026, 16:07:22 UTC
Based on a feed excerpt; full article content has not been acquired. Source evidence retrieved 13/11/2026, 14:50:24 UTC.
Briefings
Christoph Hellwig announced the public release of XRAID, a declustered parity RAID implementation integrated into XFS designed for zoned devices like SMR hard drives. The system aims to provide fast RAID performance without data integrity issues, achieving up to 20x faster writes than mdraid on SSDs. Development began a year and a half ago, with the current version supporting zero to two parities; support for three or more parities is planned via the SnapRAID library but not yet included.
Key points
- Christoph Hellwig announced the public release of XRAID, a declustered parity RAID implementation integrated into XFS designed for zoned devices like SMR hard drives.
- The system achieves up to 20 times faster writes than mdraid on SSDs, though SSD optimization was not a primary focus of the initial implementation.
Context
XRAID is a new RAID technology developed by Christoph Hellwig, with work ongoing for a year and a half. It addresses the need for fast RAID on zoned devices while avoiding data integrity problems inherent in traditional parity RAID. The announcement marks the initial public release, though upstream submission is not yet planned.
Limitations
Current implementation supports only zero to two parities; support for three or more parities is planned via the SnapRAID library but not yet included. The xfsprogs branch includes mkfs support and an xraid utility, but video of the FOSSY presentation is unavailable. The article does not provide specific dates for the initial public release or the exact release date of the xraid utility.
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