alt Hacker NewsJust wanted to throw out there that although I'm a fan of FUSE, it's not the only option. I've had fun implementing a virtual filesystem via the 9p protocol not too long ago.
IIRC, I used py9p and the python experience was much nicer than fuse-python. You can mount a 9p service via FUSE (9pfuse) if you want. I just used the kernel v9fs client. If you're just looking to pass a filesystem through the network, I think I used the diod 9p server.
Overall, it's a nice little ecosystem to explore.
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I was experimenting about 18 months ago with FUSE in front of an HTTPS URL, essentially a large file I wanted to be able to random read as if it was local, without downloading it first.
One of the things I ran in to that made it painful, was that the block sizes for FUSE were really small, it made for a lot of latency and churn of HTTP calls to the back end that ended up needing some fairly complicated caching/pre-reading logic to handle. Kernel read-ahead logic never seemed to kick in (and I didn't do any investigation in to that at the time, other than not finding any particular way to induce it)
to note here is that fuse(virtiofs) can be used for better performance in qemu than 9p(virtio-9p)
can read the faq in https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io
It looks like py9p was last released in 2013 and it's still marked as "beta". Cool project though!
9p is such a great little protocol. diod[0] has a good amount of documentation on the protocol itself, but it's pretty simple.
I have some notes here [1], but it's mostly just linking to primary sources. FUSE is great, but 9P is more general and has high quality implementations all over the place, even in Windows!
One thing I'm not so sure about is the performance properties of 9p. I've seen some places indicate it's rather slow, but nothing definitive. Does anyone have any benchmarks or info on that?
[0]: https://github.com/chaos/diod/blob/master/protocol.md [1]: https://athenaeum.wiki/Zettelkasten/9p