New "FUSE2" Kernel Driver Being Experimented With For File-Systems In User-Space

[phoronix]

Phoronix: New "FUSE2" Kernel Driver Being Experimented With For File-Systems In User-Space

Longtime FUSE developer Miklos Szeredi of Red Hat has been working on a new "FUSE2" FUSE kernel driver for implementing file-systems in user-space...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FUSE2-Kernel-Driver-Experiment

[Hibiki Kanzaki]

User space filesystems as good an idea as networked filesystems. FUSE is an evolved form of a hack around the treatment of user space filesystems as a dumb idea. FUSE2 could be cleaner if the kernel is more accommodating to the idea.

[polarathene]

It'd be nice if there was a way to make common linux filesystems more portable for external use. Sometimes it's just easier to go with FAT32/exFAT/NTFS for external storage if it's going to be used on more than one system, even if it's between linux users, since UID/GID and the like can get in the way. I get why for security/privacy reasons that they're useful in general, but sometimes you just want the media to be readable/writable by anyone for exchanging data, but would also like to use the more capable filesystems(especially since FAT32/exFAT/NTFS have varying constraints and/or lack of features that EXT4/XFS/BTRFS and the like have).

When you copy data over, it'll bring those permissions and related metadata with it. You can use ACLs for ensuring new files are created as a specific user/group and perms iirc, but for stuff that's copied over, you have to chown/chmod. Could probably handle that in a few ways, but then each system(including ones that you don't control) needs such, vs some native support in a commonly shipped driver.

[Lycanthropist]

There is also UDF as an universal file system. Can be used by Linux, Windows and macOS.

[ferry]

Linus doesn't like microkernels. But for those who do, and are willing to sacrifice performance for it, fuse is a step in the right direction.

[polarathene]

There is also UDF as an universal file system. Can be used by Linux, Windows and macOS.

Yeah... kinda. It has various issues. See https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comme...l_yes/eydf2r8/

I'd say you're probably better off with exFAT if you want cross-platform filesystem atm. I suppose UDF could work for that need between Linux machines, but exFAT should be just as good with kernel driver? XFS/EXT4/F2FS would be better if there were a way to work around permissions, BTRFS I'm not so sure, that seems less portable depending on kernel on systems and features(mount options).

[Adarion]

I dearly hope Fuse2 will be more performant.
Using fuse-plugin-filesystem is... well, it's okay for interoperability, but performance is far from being awesome, as soon as your media is faster than a slower USB stick (and not interface-bottlenecked). It's okay for the occasional use, but recently I wanted to copy a number of larger files onto some NTFS and speed was really slow on an enterprise HDD - that is otherweise nearly as fast as some slow SSD with some kernel-native FS like ext4.

[starshipeleven]

Yeah... kinda. It has various issues. See https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comme...l_yes/eydf2r8/

I'd say you're probably better off with exFAT if you want cross-platform filesystem atm. I suppose UDF could work for that need between Linux machines, but exFAT should be just as good with kernel driver? XFS/EXT4/F2FS would be better if there were a way to work around permissions, BTRFS I'm not so sure, that seems less portable depending on kernel on systems and features(mount options).

exFAT is garbage, even more than FAT32 is because it does not use two tables to kinda have some form of journaling.

We need a journaled filesystem for the very least, (better if fully CoW) for external drives. Does not need to be large and heavy like btrfs or zfs. Any log-structured filesystem like UDF or NILFS is fine (log-structured filesystems are also CoW by definition) as long as it has good support in WIndows and MacOS (which UDF lacks).

[Britoid]

I wonder if this is because rootless podman which Red Hat is pushing currently uses fuse and isn't the greatest for performance.

[Britoid]

exFAT is garbage, even more than FAT32 is because it does not use two tables to kinda have some form of journaling.

We need a journaled filesystem for the very least, (better if fully CoW) for external drives. Does not need to be large and heavy like btrfs or zfs. Any log-structured filesystem like UDF or NILFS is fine (log-structured filesystems are also CoW by definition) as long as it has good support in WIndows and MacOS (which UDF lacks).

It needs to be a filesystem that's easily implementable in firmware, journaled filesystems heavily complicate that, same with CoW.