7 ms·

Writing a FUSE file system in Go

105 points by mseepgood 13y ago

ZirconCode 13y ago
Very informative for slides. I'm used to worse. Quick UI feedback, I had to use the keyboard to get to the next slide, it seems not possible with purely the mouse. Might want to change that.
- thejosh 13y ago
  Clicking the next slide goes to the next slide fine for me. Chrome 27.0.1453.110, Ubuntu.
- arethuza 13y ago
  Move the mouse pointer until it becomes a hand at the left of the next slide (but not too far). It does work - but fairly non-obvious.
- laumars 13y ago
  That's a sizing problem. I couldn't work out how to switch slides until I'd maximized my browser, allowing the neighboring slides to sneak into view (and thus visible to click). It's a pity the presentation isn't more responsive / dynamic to the browser's viewable area, but at least the content is there and at least this is an interesting topic which is worth my time scrolling through the slides - which is the most important thing :)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
limmeau 13y ago
FUSE is somewhere on the top of my "cool tools I wish I had a use for some day", together with Go, so thanks for posting this! BTW does anyone know if there is something similar to FUSE, but for block-devices? I've written a rudimentary NBD server to read my old OS X sparsebundles on Linux, but NBD seems a bit over-general for that purpose.
- zimbatm 13y ago
  The Camlistore VFS is written in Go and has read-only fuse bindings if you want to have a look: http://camlistore.org/code/?p=camlistore.git;a=tree;f=cmd/cammount;h=0f320dc241aa7e361f567235f65c0cd6c2f014a4;hb=HEAD http://camlistore.org/code/?p=camlistore.git;a=tree;f=cmd/ca...
- deweerdt 13y ago
  > BTW does anyone know if there is something similar to FUSE, but for block-devices? https://github.com/acozzette/BUSE https://github.com/acozzette/BUSE The disclaimer says it's experimental, though.
  - limmeau 13y ago
    Thanks. I see it wraps NBD, too.
justincormack 13y ago
Yes I thought the kernel API did not look too hard to use; FUSE support is no the TODO list for ljsyscall[1] which is a LuaJIT implementation of the Linux (and partially OSX, NetBSD) kernel API. Implementing against native kernel APIs in a scripting language with an ffi is manageable although the interfaces are large; Go seems to be about the only language that has a real effort to do this, other than my project (do have longer term plans to port to Ruby, Pypy one day once it is abstracted out more). [1] https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall
rgbrenner 13y ago
The content of the slides is good/informative.. but the UI for the slides is terrible. I didn't know where to click, I tried clicking on the slide next to it... tried dragging the slide over, and selected a bunch of text. Clicked a few other parts of the screen.. Then it occurred to me to try the arrows. If I hadn't thought of that, I would have just left. Why would you design something like that? At least give people instructions.
- tokenizerrr 13y ago
  Clicking on the next slide works fine for me, and it was the first thing I tried.
  - sciurus 13y ago
    You have to click on the left third of the next slide, or the right third of the current slide.
- 4ad 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure you can't drag slides over in Powerpoint either. It's a tool for the presenter, the guy giving the talk, not for you, guy on the Internet. It's HTML 5, so it's easy to share with you or with the audience, but he is the user of the tool, not you. /edit: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/X9z59NxSvtg/Sj0CQk_C1HYJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/X9z59NxSvtg/Sj0C...
- jerf 13y ago
  As a NoScript user, I sometimes try to explain to people that for every site ruined by NoScript, there's another site that's made easier to use. This would be one of the examples of the latter. I just got a nice HTML text-ish file with headers for the slides.
- joblessjunkie 13y ago
  It's also basically impossible to read on an iOS device.
- vanderZwan 13y ago
e12e 13y ago
oh, wow - I always thought FUSE was a c-library - didn't realize it was this "smart". I guess I'll have to go look more closely at the various FUSE projects :-)
contingencies 13y ago
It seems to me with Linux's dominance, FUSE is becoming an attractive way to export APIs, since by operating at the filesystem layer full access is guaranteed to all programs regardless of creed... without having to write a C library, or a corresponding library for every language. This is particularly useful for shell scripts. It's still a tradeoff though, and *BSD'ers won't be super pleased if it becomes too popular.
- koppa 13y ago
  Yeah it is quite cool. Some time ago, I wrote a movie database with fuse backend and data supplied by imdb. It is really easy and straight forward to program.
- 4ad 13y ago
  Linux discovering Plan 9 ideas, only 20 years later.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Linux is mostly about re-implementing old stuff, sadly I am yet to see many new ideas being explored, besides what commercial UNIXes and Mainframes offer.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      It's open source, you can go and implement this "novel stuff" yourself.
      - 4ad 13y ago
        No, you really can't. Plan 9 wasn't a modification of the Research Unix they used at the Labs, it was a new operating system because Unix couldn't implement the required abstractions in an orthogonal way. Plan 9 replaces the abstractions offered by Unix with different new ones; you can't just add new abstractions on top of old ones. It's a completely different world, different process and security models which are incompatible with the old models. Linux wouldn't be Linux anymore. One reason why you would want Linux with Plan 9 semantics instead of Plan 9 is because Linux has a lot of drivers. Unfortunately, the I/O model is a consequence on how Plan 9 does things, and if you want Plan 9 semantics in Linux you'd have to modify all the drivers. Every driver that uses IOCTLs would have to be modified, which is pretty much every one of them. Plus, whatever you did, there's the small matter of Linux people accepting you changes. A Linux fork is useless; if it's not in mainline, it doesn't exist. Historically the Linux folks haven't been very happy with these kind of changes...
krishnasrinivas 13y ago
Somebody should port GlusterFS to Go!
nutmeg 13y ago
The Wikipedia page has a list of interesting projects based on FUSE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace#Example_Uses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace#Example...

105 points by mseepgood 13y ago

Very informative for slides. I'm used to worse. Quick UI feedback, I had to use the keyboard to get to the next slide, it seems not possible with purely the mouse. Might want to change that.

thejosh 13y ago
Clicking the next slide goes to the next slide fine for me. Chrome 27.0.1453.110, Ubuntu.
arethuza 13y ago
Move the mouse pointer until it becomes a hand at the left of the next slide (but not too far). It does work - but fairly non-obvious.
laumars 13y ago
That's a sizing problem. I couldn't work out how to switch slides until I'd maximized my browser, allowing the neighboring slides to sneak into view (and thus visible to click). It's a pity the presentation isn't more responsive / dynamic to the browser's viewable area, but at least the content is there and at least this is an interesting topic which is worth my time scrolling through the slides - which is the most important thing :)

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

limmeau 13y ago

FUSE is somewhere on the top of my "cool tools I wish I had a use for some day", together with Go, so thanks for posting this! BTW does anyone know if there is something similar to FUSE, but for block-devices? I've written a rudimentary NBD server to read my old OS X sparsebundles on Linux, but NBD seems a bit over-general for that purpose.

zimbatm 13y ago
The Camlistore VFS is written in Go and has read-only fuse bindings if you want to have a look: http://camlistore.org/code/?p=camlistore.git;a=tree;f=cmd/cammount;h=0f320dc241aa7e361f567235f65c0cd6c2f014a4;hb=HEAD http://camlistore.org/code/?p=camlistore.git;a=tree;f=cmd/ca...
deweerdt 13y ago
> BTW does anyone know if there is something similar to FUSE, but for block-devices? https://github.com/acozzette/BUSE https://github.com/acozzette/BUSE The disclaimer says it's experimental, though.
- limmeau 13y ago
  Thanks. I see it wraps NBD, too.

justincormack 13y ago

Yes I thought the kernel API did not look too hard to use; FUSE support is no the TODO list for ljsyscall[1] which is a LuaJIT implementation of the Linux (and partially OSX, NetBSD) kernel API. Implementing against native kernel APIs in a scripting language with an ffi is manageable although the interfaces are large; Go seems to be about the only language that has a real effort to do this, other than my project (do have longer term plans to port to Ruby, Pypy one day once it is abstracted out more). [1] https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall

rgbrenner 13y ago

The content of the slides is good/informative.. but the UI for the slides is terrible. I didn't know where to click, I tried clicking on the slide next to it... tried dragging the slide over, and selected a bunch of text. Clicked a few other parts of the screen.. Then it occurred to me to try the arrows. If I hadn't thought of that, I would have just left. Why would you design something like that? At least give people instructions.

tokenizerrr 13y ago
Clicking on the next slide works fine for me, and it was the first thing I tried.
- sciurus 13y ago
  You have to click on the left third of the next slide, or the right third of the current slide.
4ad 13y ago
I'm pretty sure you can't drag slides over in Powerpoint either. It's a tool for the presenter, the guy giving the talk, not for you, guy on the Internet. It's HTML 5, so it's easy to share with you or with the audience, but he is the user of the tool, not you. /edit: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/X9z59NxSvtg/Sj0CQk_C1HYJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/X9z59NxSvtg/Sj0C...
jerf 13y ago
As a NoScript user, I sometimes try to explain to people that for every site ruined by NoScript, there's another site that's made easier to use. This would be one of the examples of the latter. I just got a nice HTML text-ish file with headers for the slides.
joblessjunkie 13y ago
It's also basically impossible to read on an iOS device.
vanderZwan 13y ago

e12e 13y ago

oh, wow - I always thought FUSE was a c-library - didn't realize it was this "smart". I guess I'll have to go look more closely at the various FUSE projects :-)

contingencies 13y ago

It seems to me with Linux's dominance, FUSE is becoming an attractive way to export APIs, since by operating at the filesystem layer full access is guaranteed to all programs regardless of creed... without having to write a C library, or a corresponding library for every language. This is particularly useful for shell scripts. It's still a tradeoff though, and *BSD'ers won't be super pleased if it becomes too popular.

koppa 13y ago
Yeah it is quite cool. Some time ago, I wrote a movie database with fuse backend and data supplied by imdb. It is really easy and straight forward to program.
4ad 13y ago
Linux discovering Plan 9 ideas, only 20 years later.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Linux is mostly about re-implementing old stuff, sadly I am yet to see many new ideas being explored, besides what commercial UNIXes and Mainframes offer.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    It's open source, you can go and implement this "novel stuff" yourself.
    - 4ad 13y ago
      No, you really can't. Plan 9 wasn't a modification of the Research Unix they used at the Labs, it was a new operating system because Unix couldn't implement the required abstractions in an orthogonal way. Plan 9 replaces the abstractions offered by Unix with different new ones; you can't just add new abstractions on top of old ones. It's a completely different world, different process and security models which are incompatible with the old models. Linux wouldn't be Linux anymore. One reason why you would want Linux with Plan 9 semantics instead of Plan 9 is because Linux has a lot of drivers. Unfortunately, the I/O model is a consequence on how Plan 9 does things, and if you want Plan 9 semantics in Linux you'd have to modify all the drivers. Every driver that uses IOCTLs would have to be modified, which is pretty much every one of them. Plus, whatever you did, there's the small matter of Linux people accepting you changes. A Linux fork is useless; if it's not in mainline, it doesn't exist. Historically the Linux folks haven't been very happy with these kind of changes...

krishnasrinivas 13y ago

Somebody should port GlusterFS to Go!

nutmeg 13y ago

The Wikipedia page has a list of interesting projects based on FUSE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace#Example_Uses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace#Example...