Filesystem in Userspace

A flow-chart diagram which shows how FUSE works
Stable release	2.7.4 / 2008-07-25; 16 months ago
Preview release	2.8.0-pre2 / 2009-01-06; 10 months ago
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix-like
Type	File system driver
License	The kernel part GPL and Libfuse under LGPL.
Website	http://fuse.sourceforge.net/

Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) is a loadable kernel module for Unix-like computer operating systems, that allows non-privileged users to create their own file systems without editing the kernel code. This is achieved by running the file system code in user space, while the FUSE module only provides a "bridge" to the actual kernel interfaces.

Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License, FUSE is free software. The FUSE system was originally part of A Virtual Filesystem (AVFS), but has since split off into its own project on SourceForge.net.

FUSE is available for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD (as PUFFS), OpenSolaris, and Mac OS X. It was officially merged into the mainstream Linux kernel tree in kernel version 2.6.14.

Contents 1 Virtual file system 2 Examples 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Virtual file system

FUSE is particularly useful for writing virtual file systems. Unlike traditional filesystems, which essentially save data to and retrieve data from disk, virtual filesystems do not actually store data themselves. They act as a view or translation of an existing filesystem or storage device.

In principle, any resource available to FUSE implementation can be exported as a file system.

[edit] Examples

• WebDrive: A commercial filesystem implementing WebDAV, SFTP, FTP, FTPS and Amazon S3
• ExpanDrive: A commercial filesystem implementing SFTP/FTP/FTPS using FUSE
• GlusterFS: Clustered Distributed Filesystem having capability to scale up to several petabytes.
• SSHFS: Provides access to a remote filesystem through SSH
• GmailFS: Filesystem which stores data as mail in Gmail
• EncFS: Encrypted virtual filesystem
• NTFS-3G and Captive NTFS, allowing access to NTFS filesystems
• WikipediaFS : View and edit Wikipedia articles as if they were real files
• Sun Microsystems's Lustre cluster filesystem will use FUSE to allow it to run in userspace, so that a FreeBSD port is possible. ^[1] However, the ZFS-Linux port of Lustre will be running ZFS's DMU (Data Management Unit) in userspace. ^[2]
• archivemount
• RUNZ files are mounted with the help of FUSE, to allow portable apps to run on Super OS
• LoggedFS[1]: Logging of file system access
• HDFS: FUSE bindings exist for the open source Hadoop distributed filesystem.
• mtpfs: mounting MTP devices like Creative Zen music players
• Sector File System: Sector is a distributed file system designed for large amount of commodity computers. Sector uses FUSE to provide a mountable local file system interface.
• CurlFtpFS Filesystem to access ftp/sftp locations.
• fuse-ext2 An open source ext2/ext3 file system. (Supports Mac OS X 10.4 and later (Universal Binary), using MacFuse)
• Lessfs: inline data de-duplicating filesystem for Linux that includes support for lzo or QuickLZ compression and encryption.

[edit] See also

• Installable File System
• Dokan Windows user mode file system library

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• FUSE Home Page
• Develop your own filesystem with FUSE by Sumit Singh
• List of FUSE filesystems
• Fuse for FreeBSD
• MacFUSE
• Fuse for Windows

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