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> With that, they do expose a userspace filesystem driver interface, FUSE. Yes, which Linus has also poo-pooed: "People who think that userspace filesystems a
by usefulcat 7y ago
> With that, they do expose a userspace filesystem driver interface, FUSE.
Yes, which Linus has also poo-pooed:
"People who think that userspace filesystems are realistic for anything but toys are just misguided."
- monocasa 7y agoI mean, he's right. VFS, VMM, and buffer cache are all three sides of the same coin. Nearly every system that puts the FS in user space has abysmal performance; the one exception I can think of off the top of my head is XOK's native FS which is very very very different than traditional filesystems at every layer in the stack, and has abysmal performance again once two processes are accessing the same files.
- usefulcat 7y agoOh, I totally agree. But between that statement and this one about ZFS, the takeaway seems to be: for filesystems on Linux, go GPL or go home. Which is fine if that's his attitude, but if so I do wish he'd be more direct about it rather than making claims that are questionable at best (e.g. "ZFS is not maintained"--wtf?).
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoAnd yet people use them all the damn time because they're incredibly useful and even more importantly are relatively easy to put together compared to kernel modules. Linus is just plain wrong on this one.
- DSMan195276 7y agoYou should read the full quote, he really doesn't disagree with you: > fuse works fine if the thing being exported is some random low-use interface to a fundamentally slow device. But for something like your root filesystem? Nope. Not going to happen. His point is that FUSE is useful and fine for things that aren't performance critical, but it's fundamentally too slow for cases where performance is relevant.