Filesystem in Userspace

Filesystem in Userspace

A flow-chart diagram which shows how FUSE works
Stable release 2.8.6 / September 13, 2011; 5 months ago (2011-09-13)
Written in C
Operating system Unix-like
Type File system driver
License The kernel part GPL and Libfuse under LGPL.
Website http://fuse.sourceforge.net/

Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) is a loadable kernel module for Unix-like computer operating systems that lets non-privileged users create their own file systems without editing kernel code. This is achieved by running file system code in user space while the FUSE module provides only a "bridge" to the actual kernel interfaces.

Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License, FUSE is free software. The FUSE system was originally part of A Virtual Filesystem (AVFS), but has since split off into its own project on SourceForge.net.

FUSE is available for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD (as puffs), OpenSolaris, and Mac OS X. It was officially merged into the mainstream Linux kernel tree in kernel version 2.6.14.[1]

Contents

Virtual file system

FUSE is particularly useful for writing virtual file systems. Unlike traditional file systems that essentially save data to and retrieve data from disk, virtual filesystems do not actually store data themselves. They act as a view or translation of an existing file system or storage device.

In principle, any resource available to a FUSE implementation can be exported as a file system.

Examples

See also

References

External links