“With Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE), you can develop a user space filesystem framework without understanding filesystem internals or learning kernel module programming. Follow this simple, step-by-step guide to install, customize, and enable FUSE and AFS, so you can create your own fully functional filesystem in user space in Linux.”
Hi,
after some other’s attemps before, FUSE finally accomplished something I was missing for years: A clean and easy solution for user-space filesystems, which is clean and just works.
Using sshfs, I can watch (skip lots forwards and so on) movies with mplayer from servers over the internet*. I can mount my own music directory at my girlfriend’s place to listen what I like as if it was locally. I can use my editor of choice with remote files as if they were just on this machine.
* http://fopref.meinungsverstaerker.de/div/sshfs-fuse.png
The article is a good read to get to know what you have to do for your own cool FS (I also recommend to check the wiki on the FUSE website, there are some damn cool FSes listed already).
But you shouldn’t rely on a Makefile nowadays. Here is a sample configure.ac script, from sshfs:
AC_INIT(sshfs-fuse, 1.2)
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
AM_CONFIG_HEADER(config.h)
AC_PROG_CC
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
PKG_CHECK_MODULES(SSHFS, [fuse >= 2.2 glib-2.0])
CFLAGS=”$CFLAGS -Wall -W -D_REENTRANT $SSHFS_CFLAGS”
LIBS=”$SSHFS_LIBS”
AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile])
AC_OUTPUT
Edited 2006-02-28 22:48
Hello
Just a bit of propaganda, but, Plan9 has this ages ago ( http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9 ) and really rocks.
And good news for linux users, there is v9fs included in the linux kernel 2.6 here is the homepage of the project: http://swik.net/v9fs
I suggest all of you interested in user space filesystem reading about this.
There are some tools done, and others coming, search out there
Gabi
QNX ( http://www.qnx.com/ ) has always had user-space filesystems, too… sort of a requirement for true microkernels.
This is really spiffy though, I’d love to see something like this on MacOS X and XP.
– chrish
It would be relatively simple for a Windows FS developer (like myself
to create a shim FS that redirects FS calls to user-space.
Edited 2006-03-01 16:21
Hello
the 9p protocol is small and nice, can i convince you to make a 9p implementation for windows?
i will love to have windows as 9p clients!
thanks
gabi