Fixing and importing the fusefs kernel module - any VFS-savvy takers?

[Ivan Voras]

Hello,

After a discussion in arch@, it looks like there are many developers
interested in having fusefs in the tree but no VFS experts with the
time to fix the remaining bugs and basically make it stable enough to
commit to the base tree.

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.
Among other filesystems developed for fuse there are some cluster file
systems, some crypto file systems and helper file systems used by
Gnome and such environments. The initial FreeBSD reimplementation of
the kernel module (the userland utlities and libraries don't require
complicated porting) was 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 (i.e. due to mainline kernel changes)

2) it is currently available as a port but it is 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;

Currently, with sshfs, it is good enough to:

    - survive blogbench runs
    - survive fsx runs with arguments "-W -R -L", i.e. no mmaped
operations, no file size altering / truncate operations

There have been claims it also corrupts kernel memory.

Basically, this is a call for help in working on fusefs. There are
several developers and users willing to do testing and such but no
available developers with their hands in the guts of VFS to squash the
buried bugs. Fusefs might be especially relevant to desktop users and
as such to PC-BSD developers, so I'm cc-ing Kris in case he has a
comment.

Is anyone interested?


References:

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.architechture/13623
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