Xiafs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Xiafs was a file system for the operating system Linux which was conceived and developed by Frank Xia and was based on the Minix file system. Today it is obsolete and not in use, except possibly in some historic installations.
Linux originally used the Minix file system, but it had a number of limitations. For example, the length of filenames was limited to 14 characters and the partition size was limited to 64 MB. To replace the Minix file system, the extended file system (or ext) was developed. However, it too had some problems such as poor performance and the lack of some date stamps. Two contenders for replacing ext were quickly developed: Ext2 and Xiafs. The two file systems were included in the standard kernel in December 1993 (Linux 0.99.15). Ext2 and Xiafs had the same goal: to offer good performance, reasonable limitations (for example to allow partitions of at least 2 GiB and larger files) and fixing the flaws of ext. Initially, Xiafs was more powerful and more stable than Ext2 but, being a fairly minimalistic modification of the Minix file system, it was not very well suited for future extension.
Xiafs is less powerful and offers less functionality than Ext2. It suffers from more limitations (the maximum size of a file is 64 MiB and the maximum size of a partition is 2 GiB). The only advantage is that it uses a little less disk space for its control structures and had greater stability compared to Ext2 at that time.
The end result was that Xiafs changed very little while Ext2 evolved considerably, rapidly improving stability, performance and adding extensions. Ext2, after some shakedown time, quickly became the standard file system of Linux. Since then, Ext2 has developed into a very mature and robust file system.
Xiafs was removed along with the original Extended file system from Linux 2.1.21, as it was no longer in use and was unmaintained. Today Ext2/Ext3 are considered the standard Linux file systems and are widely used.
