Indeed, XFS was very good in its time, as were its competitors. To understand why, we need to go a little bit back in history. In the 90s, there were lots of commercial Unix variants, each major computer manufacturer had one: AIX, Irix, Tru64 (changed names a few times, I knew it as Ultrix), Solaris = SunOS, HP-UX. The vendors competed on the quality and features of their OS. That means that each of those vendors also had engineering groups building file systems. IBM's version was called JFS, for journaling file system, and came out of Austin (Texas). In those days, using journals or log structures was the hot idea (after Margo Seltzer's PhD thesis out of Berkeley), so everyone wanted one. As I worked at IBM, I used JFS heavily, and it has fine performance for reasonable workloads (in particular databases and integration of blobs with databases), and it was awesomely reliable (that shows the IBM heritage). I don't know very much about Digital's file system AdvFS, other than that it contained lots of ideas from the VAX ODS-2 file system (duh, it used the same people), and it had clustering built in (again inherited from the VAX), and was developed in Massachusetts. HP outsourced the file system to Veritas, and I used VxFS for a while when I worked there; also quite pleasant to use. In those days, there was a lot of development going on in file systems, each of the large Unix vendors competed on the strength of their offering, and the use of journaling (for crash resilience) and logging (for performance) was something the companies talked about in their advertising. Yes, in those days the industry newspaper had ads for file systems!
Because I work in storage systems and in Silicon Valley, I ended up knowing lots of the people in this business. But my personal connection with XFS is a complete coincidence and has nothing to do with work. We live in a small neighborhood in the hills about 45 minutes from the core of Silicon Valley, and one of our neighbors is an older gentleman (I think he's in his mid-80s now). About 20 years ago, we had dinner at his house on the occasion of the birthday of his twin kids (they're about the same age as our son), and one of the guests was his older brother. Turns out the brother worked at Silicon Graphics, where he was ... wait for it ... one of the architects of XFS!
