<p>Christoph Hellwig has <a href="https://lwn.net/ml/all/20261113112913.GA31748%40lst.de/">announced</a> the initial public release of XRAID—declustered parity RAID that is integrated into XFS.</p> <blockquote class="bq"> <p>The two primary aims of XRAID are to support parity RAID on zoned devices like SMR hard drives, and to provide a fast RAID implementation without inherent data integrity problems. XRAID, just like zoned XFS also works on conventional hard drives and SSDs. Optimizing for SSD performance has not been a focus, but even without that, writes are up to 20 times faster than mdraid. [...]</p> <p>Work on XRAID has been ongoing for a year and a half, and while we aren't anywhere near ready for an upstream submission, we are interested in feedback and testing from a wider audience now. The current implementation supports zero to 2 parities. We did experiments with the SnapRAID parity library to support 3 and more parities, and while that is not included in the current version, support for more parities is planned and the code is prepared for it.</p> <p>The xfsprogs branch includes mkfs support and a new "xraid" utility for managing devices and inspecting an XRAID file-systems. We have also extended Zonar (The zoned file-system visualisation tool) to show how each logical zone maps onto physical zones on devices.</p> </blockquote> <p>Hellwig gave a <a href="https://2026.fossy.ca/schedule/presentation/451/">presentation</a> at FOSSY in August on this topic; video of the talk does not seem to be available yet, but his <a href="https://verein.lst.de/~hch/raid-sucks.pdf">slides</a> are available.</p>
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