The xfs_healer man page

[Posted January 20, 2026 by corbet]

This page was rendered from the xfsprogs-dev repository.

NAME

xfs_healer - automatically heal damage to XFS filesystem metadata

SYNOPSIS

xfs_healer [ OPTIONS ] mount-point
xfs_healer -V

DESCRIPTION

xfs_healer is a daemon that tries to automatically repair damaged XFS filesystem metadata.

WARNING! This program is EXPERIMENTAL, which means that its behavior and interface could change at any time!

xfs_healer asks the kernel to report all observations of corrupt metadata, media errors, filesystem shutdowns, and file I/O errors. The program can respond to runtime metadata corruption errors by initiating targeted repairs of the suspect metadata or a full online fsck of the filesystem.

Normally this program runs as a systemd service. The service is activated via the xfs_healer_start service if systemd is supported.

The kernel may not support repairing or optimizing the filesystem. If this is the case, the filesystem must be unmounted and xfs_repair(8) run on the filesystem to fix the problems.

OPTIONS

--autofsck: Use the autofsck filesystem property to decide whether or not to repair corrupt metadata. See the --repair option for more details. If this option is specified but the kernel does not support repairs, the program will report but not act upon corruptions.
--background: Start exactly one event handling thread, no matter how many CPUs are online.
--check: Check if the filesystem supports sending health events. Exits with 0 if it does, and non-zero if not.
--everything: Ask the kernel to send us good metadata health events, not only events related to metadata corruption, media errors, shutdowns, and I/O errors.
--log: Print every event to standard output.
--repair: Always try to repair each piece of corrupt metadata when the kernel tells us about it. If an individual repair fails or the kernel tells us that health events were lost, the xfs_scrub service for this mount point will be launched. The default is not to try to repair anything. If this option is specified but the kernel does not support repairs, the program will exit.
-V: Prints the version number and exit.

CAVEATS

xfs_healer is an immature utility! Do not run this program unless you have backups of your data! This program takes advantage of in-kernel scrubbing to verify a given data structure with locks held and can keep the filesystem busy for a long time. The kernel must be new enough to support the SCRUB_METADATA ioctl.