TIL: FUSE

Recently I’ve been learning about FUSE: filesystem in userspace. It’s a way of writing a program to handle filesystem calls with a custom program. It allows the kernel to delegate file handling logic to a user space app.

Apparently it can be quite a bit slower than normal file syscalls because of context switches between the kernel and userspace.

Here are some links:

• Interesting presentation on performance here. Talks about the ext
• Writing a fust filesystem in Rust here
• Bazel wrote a rust FUSE module for sandboxing that might be useful for the kind of testing I’ve been thinking about

It would be really interesting to create an optimized fuse system for node_modules. Who cares about windows amiright?