From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ron minnich To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] user-level file systems for Linux In-Reply-To: <20040219101557.035de8f0.martin@parvat.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 21:58:00 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: ecc318a8-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Martin C.Atkins wrote: > On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 20:57:42 -0500 "Russ Cox" wrote: > >... > > Actually there have been a handful of projects doing > > similar things over the past few years, and they've all > > died out. I'm optimistic about FUSE because it's almost > > an exact translation of the VFS layer, meaning that it's > > simple and as expressive as possible. > > > > Russ > > I wrote a user-mode filesystem for Linux just yesterday. In Python > (using a library I hacked up early last year). Works great. One of these days > I'll get around to packaging it up, and releasing it, if people are > interested. w.r.t. these things and 9p2000: it seems to me there are ops in the Linux VFS that can not be expressed in 9p2000. Three that come to mind are symlinks, hard links, and extended attributes (used for ACLs). The Linux inode fields have some things that 9p2000 doesn't have, and vice-versa. I had to add hard link/symlink ops to my 9p2000 to make things work as expected on linux (else users will get mad). So I got several more ops for things I really did not want to add, but had to. I'm not sure I see how 9p2000 could support everything that FUSE would want to do. Take a look inside any existingt NFS client/server to see how really crazy it gets once named pipes, device nodes, etc. start to creep in. The goal of using 9p2000 with these things may require some difficult decisions ... possibly the easiest thing to do is learn NFS V4 :-( ron