Huawei engineers introduced an experimental file system called XMFS at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2026 in Prague on October 5. The system is designed for modern Linux servers equipped with CXL 3.0 or Huawei Unified Bus technology.
The primary goal of XMFS is to provide direct addressing of cross-node shared memory through standard POSIX interfaces. This approach allows existing Linux applications to access shared memory without requiring modifications to their underlying logic.
The project focuses on utilizing cross-node memory as a storage layer. Preliminary experiments have targeted metadata-intensive workloads and multi-node container image sharing, demonstrating the feasibility of the POSIX-based service model.
Despite progress, XMFS remains an experimental prototype. The development team is currently addressing challenges such as metadata synchronization, software cache consistency, memory capacity management, and the integration of different memory interconnects.
As of August, the openEuler kernel mailing list featured a set of v8 patches for XMFS, including 15 modified or new files covering core logic, inode management, and garbage collection. However, the system has not yet entered the official Linux kernel review process.
