Cong Wang, a kernel developer at Multikernel, introduced a new Linux filesystem called DAXFS on the Linux kernel mailing lists. As the name suggests, DAXFS is built on the Linux kernel’s Direct Access (DAX) infrastructure, allowing filesystems to access shared physical memory directly without going through the traditional block I/O stack.

According to the announcement, unlike the well-known RAMFS or TMPFS, which rely on the page cache and allocate memory on a per-instance basis, DAXFS maps contiguous physical memory regions directly into the filesystem. File reads resolve to direct memory loads, reducing memory overhead in environments where identical read-only data would otherwise be replicated in RAM.