nrfs VS rust-fuse

https://github.com/Norost/nrfs

Project description: I'm designing a custom filesystem with compression, error correction (with mirroring) & encryption.

The aim of the project is to have a filesystem with these features while remaining considerably simpler & easier to use than ZFS, btrfs etc. In particular, I aim to make it easy to use with removable media as I got a bunch of old drives that I don't want to have powered on 24/7.

I'm looking for people willing to test the filesystem. While the filesystem appears stable I believe more issues may pop up when used for long-term storage (e.g. backups). With more people using it I hope to find these issues quicker.

There are currently only (FUSE & tool/"mkfs") binaries for Linux[1]. If you want to test it but don't have a Linux installation, please let me know and I'll see if I can create a build for your OS.

Contact info: [email protected] or on Github.

P.S.: Using a block size other than 12 is currently broken, so don't adjust that parameters when creating a filesystem.

[1] https://github.com/Norost/nrfs/releases/tag/v0.2.1-alpha0

The article goes into some detail about different reasons you might want a minimal userland -- test harnesses, recovery environments, and pseudo-embedded environments. I do something similar in the test framework for https://github.com/jmillikin/rust-fuse -- to perform an integration test, I boot Linux in QEMU with a tiny custom /init.

More generally, the Linux kernel has a lot of code in it that is of generally reasonable quality and has received a lot of benchmarking/testing from well-resourced users. Sure, I could run some unikernel with a third-party network stack and SCSI drivers and ext4 implementation, but Linux already has all that stuff and it's ubiquitous. Why would I care about the extra ~30 MiB of RAM or whatever that it takes?

And that's before we even get to the topic of sharing code between environments. I can run the same unmodified binary on my desktop and on a minimal kernel-only Linux, which is not generally true of most alternative kernels.