Aug 21 2003
The ‘X’ in XFS
The XFS filesystem has been in the press quite a bit over the past few days due to SCO’s claims of ownership over it and other technologies. This has led a lot of people to ask what XFS stands for. Even well known open source leaders aren’t sure what the acronym stands for it seems, as Bruce Parens refers to it as the ‘eXtent File System’ in discussion about the SCO claims.
So today Steve Lord, principal filesystem engineer at SGI and XFS developer, sent out the following note to clear up the confusion:
Just in case you were wondering what X stood for in XFS - some folks
out there seem to be putting the X in the middle of words recently.
The X does not stand for anything except X, it is not eXtent, or
eXtended or any other word.
Originally the project was internally refered to as xFS, presumably
until marketing came up with a letter or name which was deemed
acceptable. After a while the x just stuck without having a
meaning assigned to it, and it was capitalized.
Think of it as a little like the G in GNU, the X in XFS stands
for XFS ;-)
Steve
