Abstract:
At the recent Linux Pipeline Technology Conference (LPC 2026) held in the Czech Republic, Huawei engineers officially demonstrated an experimental file system called XMFS. XMFS, the full name of "eXpress Memory FS (Extremely Fast Memory File System)", is a dedicated file system designed for modern Linux servers equipped with CXL 3.0 or Huawei unified bus.
CXL 3.0 and Huawei unified bus are memory semantic interconnect technologies that allow remote memory to be directly addressed like local memory. The core design goal of XMFS is to achieve direct access to cross-node shared memory through the standard POSIX file system interface, which can be used without modifying the upper-layer application logic.
Compared with FAMFS, DAXFS and other solutions developed by other manufacturers for CXL servers, the core advantage of XMFS is that it natively supports regular POSIX file system operations. In the basic performance benchmark test published by LPC 2026, XMFS performed well compared to traditional TMPFS.
In terms of application scenarios, Huawei has completed the testing and verification of XMFS for scenarios such as multi-node container image sharing and metadata-intensive workloads. This means that XMFS has practical value in containerized deployments and AI/HPC workloads that require frequent access to metadata.
Currently, XMFS is still in the experimental stage and has not yet been submitted to the Linux kernel mailing list for community review.
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