FUSE - implementing filesystems in user space [LWN.net]

FUSE - implementing filesystems in user space

Posted Jan 29, 2004 5:45 UTC (Thu) by mcatkins (subscriber, #4270)
Parent article: FUSE - implementing filesystems in user space

Unfortunately, this seems to be something of a graveyard of projects, I also know of (at least):

Podfuk: http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/podfuk/podfuk.html
userfs: http://www.penguin.cz/~jim/userfs/
uvfs: http://www.sciencething.org/geekthings/index.html
virtualfs: http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/virtualfs/

(although the last subverts libc, rather than using a kernel module)

as well as my own effort (not yet released!) allowing filesystems to be written in Python (as does fuse), but without requiring a non-standard kernel module.

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FUSE - implementing filesystems in user space

Posted Jan 29, 2004 10:03 UTC (Thu) by mjr (subscriber, #6979) [Link]

There's also LUFS (which incidentally supports gnome-vfs modules like fuse supports kioslaves - can't have one doing both, it seems ;). I'd really like to see one of these make it to the default kernel...

Anyway, anyone know if the fuse kernel interface is secure nowadays, in a sense that one can safely allow users to freely use even their own filesystem code to mount things? I asked basically the same on the lufs list a good while back, and there were, in effect, no answers, and the lufs daemons seem to run as root which is a kind of telltale sign that one doesn't want arbitrary user code there...

FUSE - implementing filesystems in user space

Posted Jan 29, 2004 14:00 UTC (Thu) by mszeredi (subscriber, #19041) [Link]

Security is one of the main design principles of FUSE. The only operation that requires root access is the mounting, and that can be done fairly securely by a non-root user with the help of a suid program (fusermount).