libfuse VS osxfuse

I suspect if you've run into problems with a lot of things built on FUSE, the problem is FUSE.

Yes, s3fs and sshfs can both leave the system in an unstable state. For example, there can be a dead mount which is impossible to unmount, and in severe cases, blocks a clean reboot.

A file system in user space (or in network space) should NEVER break the system, no matter what happens in user space (or in network space). Most network file systems try to respect this (albeit with mixed success). FUSE does not.

I'm not claiming FUSE cannot be made to work. Just that it's very bad since (1) plenty of smart people clearly failed to do so (2) the badness it leaves behind should be more than it's permitted to.

I can point to specific issues, but at the end of the day, that's neither here nor there. At the end of the day, something like:

https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/blob/master/example/poll....

Is about a hundred times more complicated than it should be. It should not require memsets, pthread mutexes, or flags, and should probably have an implementation in a modern, high-level language. To a large extent, that's the point of moving things out of the kernel.

I'm even perhaps okay with being permitted to do low-level operations for a particularly performance-constrained subsystem, but that's not 95% of the uses of something like FUSE.

Footnote: I actually enjoyed writing low-level code like this a lot, when computers were in the single-digit to triple-digit MHz range, and we didn't need to worry about people breaking in over a ubiquitous worldwide internet, but I left that mindset behind decades ago. Right now, I want code to be stable, simple, auditable, and secure.

I wrote the original version for a previous employer mostly in Python.

I was about to recreate a new version in Rust. And started with fixing up libfuse https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/pulls?q=author%3Amatthias... and the Rust equivalent https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/fuse-backend-rs/pulls?q=...

Your project is also interesting. I don't plan on ever adding write support. The old Python version was already using git as a library via gitpython, instead of shelling out via the command line. The new version will use Rust's gix.

Performance, even for the old Python version, was pretty decent. That probably came from using git via a library and being careful about fuse caching. The old version also already supported opening arbitrary commits, tags and branches, they were represented as different folders.

s3fs allows Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD to mount an S3 bucket via FUSE(Filesystem in Userspace). s3fs makes you operate files and directories in S3 bucket like a local file system. s3fs preserves the native object format for files, allowing use of other tools like AWS CLI.

FUSEs your files

The situation is much worse than I had imagined; the parent project, libfuse, is also in need of a maintainer.

https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse

Install macFUSE, thank me later: https://osxfuse.github.io

I didn't exactly use any 'tutorial'. Assumming you can already SSH to the target machine, you just need to install both these pkgs then reboot to 1TR Recovery Mode and choosing Reduced Security and choose to enable Kernel Extension and then reboot again goto Security & Privacy and Allow the extension, and that's it you can now use it.

Yeah, FUSE is Linux only. But for completeness, for macs there is macFUSE, and for Windows there is winfsp. Both of these have fewer filesystems than FUSE, and I've used neither so I don't know how well they work.

https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/List-of-macFUSE-File...

https://winfsp.dev/doc/Known-File-Systems/

Weird. Where did you download (lat/new)est MacFuse from? https://osxfuse.github.io/ I hope!

I lead a project that included shipping a filesystem driver and a virtual disk on Windows.

What I did to learn the lower-level APIs, and perform initial testing on the driver, was write a "mirror" drive. The user-mode code pointed to a folder on disk, the driver made a virtual disk drive, and all reads and writes in the virtual disk drive went to the mirror folder.

On Windows, you can implement something like that using Dokany, Dokan, or Winfsp. On linux, there's the Fuse API. On Mac, there's MacFUSE.

Even if you don't do a "mirror" drive, understanding the callbacks that libraries like Dokany, Dokan, Winfsp, and Fuse do helps you understand how IO happens in the driver. Many IO methods provided in popular languages provide abstractions above what the OS does. (For example, the Windows kernel has no concept of the "Stream" that's in your C# program. The "Stream"'s Position property is purely a construct within the .Net framework.)

https://dokan-dev.github.io/

https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany

https://osxfuse.github.io/

Another place to start is the OS's documentation itself. For example, you can start with Window's CreateFileA function. This typically is what gets called "under the hood" in most programming languages when you open or create a file: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/...

"FUSE-T is a kext-less implementation of FUSE for macOS that uses NFS v4 local server instead of a kernel extension. The main motivation for this project is to replace macfuse (https://osxfuse.github.io/) that implements its own kext to make fuse work. With each version of macOS it's getting harder and harder to load kernel extensions. Apple strongly discourages it and, for this reason, software distributions that include macfuse are very difficult to install. Additionally, the macfuse kext is unstable, may cause frequent system crashes and kernel lock-ups. Given those limitations many software publishers are unable to use macfuse anymore. FUSE-T doesn't make use of kernel extension, it implements its own userspace server that converts between FUSE protocol and NFS calls and let macOS mount NFS volume instead of a kernel filesystem."

MacFuse (ntfs-3g) and a Foolproof way of getting it working via Homebrew.

macos doesn’t support many Linux file system formats. You’ll have to use something like macFUSE https://osxfuse.github.io/