Slashdot Mirror
Plethora of New User Space Filesystems For Mac OS X
DaringDan writes "As part of the recent MacFUSE 2.0 release Amit Singh has added support for an insane number of filesystems on the Mac. This video from Google and this blog post pretty much explain everything in detail but to sum-up Singh has written a new filesystem called AncientFS which lets you mount a ton of UNIX file formats starting from the very first version of UNIX. Even more interesting is that they have also taken Linux kernel implementations of filesystems like ufs, sysv-fs, minix-fs and made them work in user-space on the Mac, which means its now possible to read disks from OSes like FreeBSD, Solaris and NeXT on OS X. ext2/ext3 don't seem to be on the list but apparently the source for everything is provided, so hopefully some enterprising soul can apply the same techniques to ext2. One of their demos even has the old UNIX kernel compiled directly on the Mac through the original PDP C compiler by somehow executing the PDP binaries on OS X!"
Fist Proust
Dylan lainhart 1st post leet haxor
They should rename the project to MacFAG ( Macintosh Filesystem Appending Globule).
It would better reflect the Apple computing philosophy. By the way, Steve Jobs: AIDS or cancer? Takin' all bets!
woot.
How is this news while the Mac Blue Screen problem upon upgrade thing isn't mentioned anywhere on the front page? (It was news on other sites yesterday.)
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
I still have the old Intel Rhapsody DR2 disks lying around, and would love to see if this can read the filesystem. It's kind of fun playing around it what was NeXT with a MacOS interface, and at times I almost would rather have it than what OS X became, if only to eliminate the stupid gimmicks.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Especially if I ever need to recover one of my linux box's drives from a Mac.
But really, all I want for christmas is NTFS write support.
The practical value of all this may not be that great for 99% of the users out there, but I really understand the geek value of this all. It's like when I experimented calling a Volume Shadow Copy provider I wrote in C# from my Delphi application. Just for fun. I could have done this easier using only Delphi or C# only, but my point was just to see if it was possible. And it was cool, for me anyway.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
What is needed is an ext3 implementation. There've been projects to bring ext2/3 to the Mac, but so far they've been incomplete and abandoned.
I'm actually pretty surprised that this hasn't been properly implemented already.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
...might include DEC's AdvFS, whose framework was recently released by HP. Yes, it would need some tidying up and porting, but couple that with an Alpha emulator and someone could run Tru64 UNIX apps and their data on a Mac...
> which means its now possible to read disks from
> OS's like FreeBSD,
I'm reasonably certain that you can read ufs/ffs file systems, and have been since 10.0.
A plethora of new user space filesystems for OS X and they didn't include the most common Linux filesystems? That seems odd.
A couple years old, but ext2fsx still works.
Best Slashdot Co
Some users installing third party apps that modify their system files, and then apply updates over them have issues is hardly newsworthy.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Ummm... Why bother? If the functionality is really *that* important, why not just install Linux, which already has support for these filesystems? I mean, if you've got a hard on for a proprietary OS that crashes just as much as modern versions of windows do (albeit with less bloat) then I get it. But only then.
So it supports and insane number of filesystems just not the two most popular ones?
Insane's the word...
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
You most certainly can if you want to. But if you have system files A and B and you modify B and later system update modifies A to call something in B that you changed the behavior of, then don't blame the system update.
That's all I'm saying.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Also, it seems to be a good time to plug Dokan and my FUSE4Win project :)
There's a wonderful project named "Dokan" (http://dokan-dev.net/en/), it makes posssible to write user-space filesystem in Windows.
I've adapted FUSE interface for it, so it's possible to use (almost) unmodified FUSE filesystems in Windows: http://hg.sharesource.org/fuse4win
Currently, SSHFS works fine. NTFS3g also works :)
Too bad it for the mac, lets make it work under Ubuntu so it can be useful to those of us who don't want to overpay for our hardware.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
No, NTFS has support via NTFS3G. The other popular file system, FAT, is already supported natively.
Jefe: I have put many beautiful new user space filesystems in the Mac OS X, each of them filled with little suprises.
El Guapo: Many new user space filesystems?
Jefe: Oh yes, many!
El Guapo: Would you say I have a plethora of new user space filesystems?
Jefe: A what?
El Guapo: A *plethora*.
Jefe: Oh yes, you have a plethora.
El Guapo: Jefe, what is a plethora?
Jefe: Why, El Guapo?
El Guapo: Well, you told me I have a plethora. And I just would like to know if you know what a plethora is. I would not like to think that a person would tell someone he has a plethora, and then find out that that person has *no idea* what it means to have a plethora.
Jefe: Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me?
So it supports and insane number of filesystems just not the two most popular ones?
It's true that FUSE doesn't support the #1 most popular file system, but it doesn't need to. FAT is already supported by every major OS.
For the sake of argument, let's not count 9660 and UDF, which are also built-in to most OSes.
FUSE does support NTFS, which is #2.
HFS is probably in 3rd place, with ext* rather farther down the list.
He talks about 3 generation of Mac OS X where one is censored or illegal. Anyone know what he meant? *confused*
What! No ReiserFS support; sounds like discrimination against a convicted murderer to me.
Jamey
Jamey Kirby
welcome the ability to compile and run ancient PDP-11 binaries on my shiny new Mac..."values of B will give rise to dom!"
I've got your sig, right here.
Apple's GS/OS had FSTs (File System Translators) that allowed that operating system to access HFS, ProDOS, DOS 3.3, and FAT volumes. How does FUSE compare in function to GS/OS's FSTs? You know, apart from working with non-obsolete hardware.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Thank you Apple for making all of this possible.
If it weren't for Apple, Unix and open source would be dead and all of this history and cool code would be gone.
So once again, THANK YOU APPLE. For doing what no one else can or could ever do.
Think different. Think better. THINK APPLE.
They aren't providing a GUI for sshfs on macfuse anymore
I was disappointed about that too until I discovered MacFusion, which is like the sshfs GUI app, but does any FS that MacFUSE supports.
As probably the most commonly used filesystem on linux, is ext3 supported by Mac OS X FUSE?
If not, why not?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
As such, this means FUSE is less reliable, poorly documented, MUCH harder to use, and is chock full of bugs.
OS X is proof positive that closed source is superior to open source in every way.
It actually just supports sshfs and ftpfs at the moment, but people could write plugins for it to support other FUSE plugins.
I find it odd that they used the linux implementation to mount UFS instead of the FreeBSD version which OSX(Darwin) is based upon already
I've seen plenty of stories where Joe hacked this, or John hacked that or Larry came up with this ingenious hack. But since when is slashdot concerned with the details of said hack?
If your news story is "If you hack your Mac OS X system files and then upgrade, you'll get a blue screen," then that's not news on slashdot. Anyone crowd who is "linux-heavy" should know this and go "duh!", and anyone who is not in that crowd has no idea what that means anyway.
The news here is not that exists but the details of what a proper OS X hacker might do to avoid getting the blue screen. That type of information properly belongs on a hacker website properly formatted and dedicated to handle this type of information. Slashdot's never handled that kind of hacker detail and I don't believe they intend to, nor should they.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
ext2/ext3 don't seem to be on the list but apparently the source for everything is provided, so hopefully some enterprising soul can apply the same techniques to ext2
Corrected:
ext2/ext3 don't seem to be on the list but apparently the source for everything is provided, so the maintainer will be harassed for this feature while the "community" sits idly by.
Similes are like metaphors
So somebody at Apple finally discovered SIMH, which has been running on other UNIX systems (and Windows) for many years.
Wasn't this sort of thing the idea behind the original "plug-in" mechanism planned for Reiser 4? I remember being intrigued by the idea of writing file-system customizations in perl, and I was looking forward to playing around with it to see what could be done with it.
Unfortunately, it appears that the kernel devs don't want to hear about any functionality that doesn't fit in the box of their VFS layer.
These are mostly read-only implementations for dealing with archival data. They're not read/write, which is more work to implement and not that useful.
QNX has had user-space file systems for decades. (It's a microkernel; almost everything is in user space.) Some users wrote file system implementations for weird file systems, like .zip files. Most of the modern QNX file system action is supporting various flash-based file systems and networked file systems.
Schwing!
I'm probably betraying my ignorance here, but the ability to implement filesystems in userspace was supposed to be one of the advantages of microkernel based operating systems. Given that Mac OS X is based on the Mach kernel, could this be better done as a Mach server (i.e. at the Mach layer) than in user space under the FreeBSD layer? I recognize that Darwin doesn't really take advantage of Mach as a microkernel in the way that it should, but surely there's *some* advantage to being built on Mach, right?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
This is the one I'd most like to see. I've started using it extensively on my Linux boxes, and I like it much better than NFS or Samba. Big transfers require more CPU because of the encryption, but on WiFi transfer speeds are that high anyway, so it's not a bottleneck. Anyway, my wife's Mac is the one machine in the house it doesn't work on, and it would be great if she could use sshfs to mount stuff from the file server.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
> "One of their demos even has the old UNIX kernel compiled directly on the Mac
> through the original PDP C compiler by somehow executing the PDP binaries on OS X!"
Hmpfh... Circa 1978-79, Forrest Howard and I wrote a PDP-10 simulator that ran on a PDP-11/70 (a 36 bit machine on a 16 bit machine for those not educated in DEC hardware). It was used to recompile the DEC Fortran compiler which was written in Bliss-11. And the Bliss-11 compiler could only be run on a PDP-10. Lacking a PDP-10 (expensive pseudo-mainframe computers in those days) we simply wrote a simulator. It didn't run fast, as I recall the DEC Fortran compiler recompile took several weeks, but it did run.
Reproducing a PDP-11 sumulator on modern hardware would be relatively trivial, though it would have been much easier on older Macs because it could be argued that the 680X0 architecture was a knockoff of the PDP-11 architecture. Though one could suppose that current era (non-680X0 or non-PowerPC) machines are fast enough that it is a noop. I think the PDP-11 had a 300 ns cycle time and current machines are ~10x faster. Any current machines could easily simulate a '70s era minicomputer (or even most mainframes).
Hahaha
I can't stop laughing either. There goes another weekend.
I have a bunch of old floppies I'd like to access... B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
seems to make this thing work. I have downloaded the DMG, mounted it, installed the package, rebooted, and... I have a new Pref Pane with very little functionality.
If I open my Terminal and type sshfs - nothing (command not found).
I am surprised at the lack of a straightforward "Getting started" page.
Can anyone point me to something that will help me find out HOW TO mount a drive?
Has anyone been able to get gmailfs working? or could point me to an instruction page I have tried getting it working and have not had a lot of luck.
thanks,
darmou
-- remove NOSPAM for actual email address -- Things are not as square as they may seem
I know this is off topic, but I really like the words 'Plethora' as well as 'thwart'.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to make up a sentence with both plethora and thwart in them that make much sense.
Something like: "I will thwart you and your plethora of new user space file systems."
Back to work....
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
WTF is the relationship between having a filesystem in userspace and emulating a PDP ?
Bad article.
How is executing PDP binaries on OSX related to filesystems?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I remember being intrigued by the idea of writing file-system customizations in perl,
Nnnngggggg *kaboom*
Please help metamoderate.
I did a quick search of the macfuse wiki, but it seems they haven't implemented support for XFS... It would be so nice to be able to format my firewire drive with xfs and use it between my 64studio box and my macbook.. Owell, guess I'll have to wait some more. No coder, I.
I use friend/foe to signal strong [dis]agreement instead of mod points. What else are f/f good for?
Thank you FOSS for making all of this possible.
If it weren't for FOSS, Apple and OSX would be dead and all of this history and cool code would be gone.
So once again, THANK YOU FOSS, for doing what no one else can or could ever do.
Think different. Think better. THINK FOSS.
Sam ty sig.
btrfs? I think not!
Macs are not very good at running other FS in User Space.
The NTFS3G user space file system is a joke.
Unlike NT which loads them into Kernel, Mac does NOT trust anything not provided by Jobs.
(Disclaimer: Iam agnostic to both: I own an iBook G4 and a kickass PC hardware with 9800GTX+ SLI running XP).
NTFS read-write facility is slow, buggy and frequently crashes the application.
I can format my disks in MacFS and use MacDrive to read write to them in XP. That's wayyy faster.
The only two file systems that Mac truly supports (i mean as fast as NTFS in XP) are FAT32 and MacFS.
The rest are a joke, and i couldn't care less, since most of the implementations would never make it to the real world.
Have you EVER seen a Mac in production running on top of a NTFS read-write RAID?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I'm both a Mac and a Linux user. I used to use the Mac quite a bit, but I'm using it less and less now. An ext3 implementation would be nice, but I basically don't care much anymore.
Well, for the last year or so, I have been using NTFS-3G every single day of the week, using it to running my virtual machines stored on a USB hard disk (performance is excellent, by the way -- with Linux's tendency to cache the VM images, Windows guest performance is easily better than running natively off a physical partition).
At my college, and at home, there are computers with faulty USB connectors. A few times a week, when running a VM, my USB cable will wriggle loose, and the hard disk will disconnect. Yes, while it's running NTFS-3G.
However, not once in the last 12 months has my NTFS filesystem become corrupted. Not once.
And MS Office can't even read files between versions?
Yeah, pretty much trolling, but come on... I need a friggin add-on between versions?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Someone makes a filesystem in the 70s, and then 30 years later is still accessible...I don't think that's gonna be the case with Windows in 30 years in the future!