{"slug": "announcing-xraid-declustered-parity-raid-for-zoned-xfs", "title": "Announcing XRAID: declustered parity RAID for zoned XFS", "summary": "Christoph Hellwig announced the initial public release of XRAID, a declustered parity RAID implementation integrated into XFS that supports parity RAID on zoned devices such as SMR hard drives and writes up to 20 times faster than mdraid. The current XRAID implementation supports zero to 2 parities, with more parities planned after experiments with the SnapRAID parity library; the xfsprogs branch adds mkfs support and a new \"xraid\" utility for managing devices and inspecting XRAID file systems. Hellwig said work has been ongoing for a year and a half and that XRAID is \"not anywhere near ready for an upstream submission,\" but he is seeking feedback and testing from a wider audience.", "body_md": "Christoph Hellwig has [announced](https://lwn.net/ml/all/20261113112913.GA31748%40lst.de/) the\ninitial public release of XRAID—declustered parity RAID that is integrated\ninto XFS.\n\nThe 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. [...]\n\nWork 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nHellwig gave a [presentation](https://2026.fossy.ca/schedule/presentation/451/) at\nFOSSY in August on this topic; video of the talk does not seem to be available\nyet, but his [slides](https://verein.lst.de/~hch/raid-sucks.pdf) are\navailable.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/announcing-xraid-declustered-parity-raid-for-zoned-xfs", "canonical_source": "https://lwn.net/Articles/1107473/", "published_at": "2026-11-13 14:39:47+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-11-13 14:50:56.255588+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Christoph Hellwig", "XRAID", "XFS", "mdraid", "SnapRAID", "xfsprogs", "Zonar", "FOSSY"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/announcing-xraid-declustered-parity-raid-for-zoned-xfs", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/announcing-xraid-declustered-parity-raid-for-zoned-xfs.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/announcing-xraid-declustered-parity-raid-for-zoned-xfs.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/announcing-xraid-declustered-parity-raid-for-zoned-xfs.jsonld"}}