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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