Importing the fusefs kernel module?

Ivan Voras ivoras at freebsd.org
Mon Oct 25 20:53:21 UTC 2010


Fusefs is the Linux-developed userland filesystem interface which is 
fairly popular in the wild, especially with the "sshfs" module which 
allows mounting of generic ssh/sftp directories in a very easy way.

It was developed in one of the very early Google Summer of Code projects 
(2005) and is now in a bit unusual situation:

1) it *is* popular, as reports about its breakage arrive pretty soon 
after it breaks

2) it is currently practically unmaintained. The source code archive is 
from 2008 and the port contains a dozen patches to be applied to it to 
make it work on recent systems

3) it is also not exactly rock stable, though this has improved with the 
above patches; personally I'd judge it to be as stable as ZFS was two 
years ago so there :)

I'm proposing to import the kernel module into the official tree (there 
are also userland libraries under the GPL; they will stay as ports). 
There are no license conflicts for the kernel module. I see two benefits 
from it:

1) it will finally integrate the patches needed for it to work in one 
tree and provide the "one official place" to work on it

2) it will be easier to maintain it here, and changes to the VFS APIs 
would be applied to it in sweeping commits together with other file systems.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to actively work on it (yet) but I can 
mechanically maintain it and generally take care of it.

Objections?



References:

http://fuse.sourceforge.net/
http://fuse4bsd.creo.hu/
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/sysutils/fusefs-kmod/
http://old.nabble.com/forum/Search.jtp?forum=6572&local=y&query=fusefs
http://old.nabble.com/forum/Search.jtp?forum=6610&local=y&query=fusefs



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