FUSE With Linux 5.15 Now Allows Mounting An Active FUSE Device

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FUSE With Linux 5.15 Now Allows Mounting An Active FUSE Device

While Linus Torvalds isn't much of a fan of FUSE / user-space file-systems, the FUSE code within the kernel does continue making improvements...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.15-FUSE

[uid313]

Now with the new NTFS driver being merged into mainline Linux kernel, what use is FUSE these days?

Are there any file system that FUSE supports that the kernel does not?
I guess FUSE will still continue to be useful for prototyping file systems when developing a new file system. Maybe?

Linux still does not have support for Apple's file system APFS.

[jacob]

Now with the new NTFS driver being merged into mainline Linux kernel, what use is FUSE these days?

Are there any file system that FUSE supports that the kernel does not?
I guess FUSE will still continue to be useful for prototyping file systems when developing a new file system. Maybe?

Linux still does not have support for Apple's file system APFS.

One answer is in the article: the CERN uses it for its infrastructure.

Other common uses of FUSE include GVFS-based mounting, cgroups management in nested LXD containers, and more.

[dragonn]

Now with the new NTFS driver being merged into mainline Linux kernel, what use is FUSE these days?

FUSE has a lot of use case outside a regural desktop filesystems. Two my own examples: I am using bindfs to get some directory work across multiple containers without any
weird permission issues, it is a small dir so I don't care about the performance. In embedded they are all kind of weird file systems for small flash chips, it is nice to have access to them like regular files, you can with easy craft a driver even in python for that in hours.

[Joe2021]

Are there any file system that FUSE supports that the kernel does not?

SSHFS.

[Hibiki Kanzaki]

With the new NTFS driver being merged into mainline Linux kernel, what use is FUSE these days?

FUSE can present any hierarchical data structure as a filesystem such that any tools which access a filesystem can be used to access the data structure.
JSON files https://github.com/calebcase/jsonfs
Active Directory (LDAP) https://github.com/mgale/ldapfs
REST API https://github.com/jboero/hashifuse

[oleid]

Now with the new NTFS driver being merged into mainline Linux kernel, what use is FUSE these days?

Are there any file system that FUSE supports that the kernel does not?

From the top of my head:

• sshfs -- mount ssh shares via fuse
• gvfs -- mount whatever gnome provides (they also have some ftp and sftp implementation and also webdav)
• rclone can mount certain cloud providers
• restic can mount its backups
• GlusterFS -- a filesystem for computer clusters
• ipfs also has fuse support. ipfs is a peer2peer filesystem
• s3fs -- amazon s3 cloud storage

[david-nk]

Now with the new NTFS driver being merged into mainline Linux kernel, what use is FUSE these days?

Are there any file system that FUSE supports that the kernel does not?
I guess FUSE will still continue to be useful for prototyping file systems when developing a new file system. Maybe?

Linux still does not have support for Apple's file system APFS.

FUSE isn't necessarily meant for classical file systems like NTFS, but rather specialized virtual file systems that provide a certain view on data or have other special functionality.
I employ several FUSE file systems for personal use. They're useful for data aggregation across many different devices/network sources and I also use it for a parity-based backup system that is similar to RAID4.

[schmidtbag]

FUSE is like a flathead screwdriver: you'd rather not use it but it's a little too necessary to not have in your toolbox.

[ssokolow]

FUSE isn't necessarily meant for classical file systems like NTFS, but rather specialized virtual file systems that provide a certain view on data or have other special functionality.
I employ several FUSE file systems for personal use. They're useful for data aggregation across many different devices/network sources and I also use it for a parity-based backup system that is similar to RAID4.

There are also:

• Union filesystems for situations where you can't or don't want to bring root permissions into the mix
• Unprivileged "mount an archive or ISO image as a filesystem" implementations
• DisorderFS (A proxy filesystem that does stuff like randomizing the order in which directory entries are returned to help find causes for non-reproducible builds)
• mp3fs (Mount it over your FLAC files and it'll transcode on the fly for when you're copying songs to something that doesn't support FLAC)
• Implementations of stuff too niche to have a kernel implementation, such as Smaky filesystems

The first two can combine quite nicely to retrofit "Mount a read-only Zip file containing the game and store writes (eg. configuration changes, save files, high scores) elsewhere" behaviour onto things like DOSBox which refuse to accept the patches for that because they believe only pirates want it.