Fuse-xfs [ Must Read ]

But fuse-xfs isn’t a port. It’s a reconstruction .

So go ahead. Write your own fuse-ext4 . Or fuse-zfs . Or fuse-ntfs . Mount your system’s root partition read-only and watch every lookup and read call pass through your printf . You’ll never look at df -h the same way again. fuse-xfs

The solution? . When fuse-xfs opens a file, it walks the entire B+tree and caches the extent list in a flat array. Memory-heavy? Yes. But it turns a 10ms seek into a 50µs array walk. 4. Writing: The Journaling Shim XFS’s journal (the “log”) is complex. It supports rolling transactions, buffer pinning, and tail pushing. fuse-xfs implements a naïve log : each write transaction is appended to a journal.bin file. On mount, we replay by applying every logged operation in order. But fuse-xfs isn’t a port

struct xfs_agf *agf = (struct xfs_agf *)(ag->map + XFS_AGF_OFFSET); if (be32_to_cpu(agf->agf_magicnum) != XFS_AGF_MAGIC) return -EINVAL; // or crash, which is more fun No buffer cache. No I/O scheduling. Just the filesystem’s raw data laid out in virtual memory. XFS’s extent B+tree is elegant: internal nodes point to other blocks, leaves point to extents. In kernel space, traversing it is cheap. In fuse-xfs , every bmap lookup might require reading several blocks—each of which is a pread() or a memory access, depending on your cache. Write your own fuse-ext4

You can’t. Not easily. The kernel is a fortress, and filesystems are its moat. Enter (Filesystem in USErspace). It’s the drawbridge. But FUSE has a reputation: it’s slow, it’s “toy” grade, and it lacks the low-level power of ext4 or xfs .

Or, Why I Spent a Weekend Reimplementing a Journaling Filesystem as a Debugging Tool

So when I decided to write fuse-xfs —a userspace implementation of the —I wasn’t trying to build a production storage engine. I was trying to answer a single question: Can we take the soul of XFS (its allocation groups, B+tree extents, and delayed allocation) and lift it into userspace without losing its identity? Here’s what I learned. The Heresy: Userspace XFS XFS, designed by SGI in the ’90s, is a kernel beast . It assumes it owns the hardware. It assumes it can reorder writes, bypass the page cache when needed, and manipulate memory directly via kmem_cache . Porting that to userspace is not just difficult—it’s borderline heretical.