FUSE Port Brings NTFS Support To OS X

sciurus0 writes "In his session at Macworld on OS X filesytems, Google's Amit Singh announced that he has ported Linux's FUSE module to OS X. The port is called MacFUSE and it is available in source form and as a pre-compiled kernel extension with associated tools. Many FUSE filesystems such as sshfs and ntfs-3g are reported to work."

Comments

FUSE for Windows

[Cyberax]

I'm writing FUSE for Windows at my spare time (not much of it, unfortunately). Is there anybody who's doing the same?

Re:FUSE for Windows

[Cyberax]

Yes, if they don't use any Linux/Unix-specific features. User-space part of FUSE, however, will have be modified (because there's no fork() in Windows).

Release is FAAAAAAAAR away now, I expect to get something working in 3-4 months.

Re:FUSE for Windows

[Foolhardy]

I have thought about porting FUSE in the past, since it'd be a great way to enable lots of filesystems in Windows but haven't gotten out of the planning stage. I'd be very interested in helping to make that happen. I have some experience in writing Windows NT filesystem drivers.

I don't know how you've planned the userspace, but I'd suggest that you make it NOT dependent on Win32. It'd be much easier to implement features like fork (which Win32 doesn't support, but native processes do). Also, native process programming follows a lot of the same conventions that kernel programming does; the code would be more consistent and lightweight. Besides, it seems unlikely that FUSE would require Win32-specific features.

Please let me know if you get a source repository up.

Re:FUSE for Windows

[TheNetAvenger]

So with FUSE ported, Windows users can also enjoy in-filesystem versioning, seamless ssh integration, RAR files as folders and so on.

Why is this such a great goal, when FS developers have been trying to meet the basic features of NTFS already...

NTFS already does journalling, has file versioning (far beyond what any *nix FS does), encyrption, compression, and with Win32, zip and rar integration.

The trick in writing a FS for Windows isn't so much a NT issue, but how Win32 see the FS and what it expects to be there. This can best be demonstrated with the Unix subsystem on Windows, or how NFS is handled.

BTW, this is kind of a baited post to see how well people really do understand NTFS and also what they are trying to accomplish.

For developers interested there are some good resources and help on writing FS for NT, like at: http://www.osronline.com/cf.cfm?PageURL=showlists. CFM?list=NTFSD

Take Care...

Great for dual booting?

[Max Romantschuk]

Boot camp users, care to comment on the implications?

How about ext3?

[MMC Monster]

How about ext3 support on Intel macs? I tried the sourceforge project about a year ago and it didn't work.

genneral problem with FUSE

[hswerdfe]

I love fuse it makes so many things so much easier.
mainly I use "sshfs". but the biggest problem I have is the same problem I have with KDE-IOSlaves.
is that you can't really chain them

It makes it easy to Open a Zip/Rar file as a folder, and it makes it easy to treat an FTP server as a folder. but what about a Zip File on an FTP server?

I just wish there was some easy way to allow the FTP/SSH file systems to recognize that a Zip File as folder.

or chain to Zip with Encryption.
or Encryption with Subversion.
all at the file system level.
any way thats my rant, but the FUSE effort is brilliant in general.

Re:FUSE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Additionally: if you link it into your application's address space, filesystem operations become zero-copy "for free". Multithreaded drivers are also a snap, and don't cause priority inversion problems for everything else, only consumers of the filesystem.

Hmm, maybe there is something to that whole microkernel thing, eh Linus?

Cocoa Fuse GUI

[mgorbach228]

I'm working on a Cocoa GUI for FUSE (currently called MacFusion). The idea is that it loads plugins for supported filesystems (working right now on SSHFS, NTFS-3G and FTPFS at first). The plugins provide a configuration interface and code to mount/unmount. I'm hoping that this GUI will make FUSE goodness easily accessible to non-technical non-console people. In the future, it should be simple to support encfs, gmailfs, etc. This will be a FOSS project once a first build is ready. Anyone who wants to help is welcome, as are suggestions of any kind on the features/interface.

Tried it and comments

[Midnight Thunder]

On reading about this I decided to install it on my Mac and see what it gives. While a great advancement, this is still a work in progress and still very much something for people familiar with the command line. The aspect that would change all this the ability to use FUSE based FS URLs in the Finder ( known issue ), though this seems to be a limitation based on some private APIs needing to be made public, which I hope Apple resolves.

Stability: SSHFS or MacFUSE at fault?

[jdbartlett]

It's a great tool and one I have practical use for, but testing it out for work I've stumbled across what I consider to be an important issue. I've only tried SSHFS so far, and I haven't done any digging to see where the fault lies, but a dropped connection (either a dropped internet connection or an SSH session the server drops) really confuses the system. Messing about, I killed my internet connection during a read, and Finder hung until my the connection was restored. Another time, my session was killed for idleness by our server; when I tried to perform a read through Terminal, both Terminal and Finder crashed and took all of OS X with them.