By popular demand, I’ve "ported" AncientFS to Linux and FreeBSD. It was reasonably straightforward. Largely on purpose, AncientFS depends on the cross-platform interfaces of MacFUSE for the most part. Most people don’t realize that MacFUSE is much more than a "Mac OS X implementation of the FUSE API." Of course, the name "MacFUSE" doesn’t help [...]

Here are some extended notes on understanding, compiling, and using AncientFS, the file system I talked about in the previous blog post.

There has been much buzz about new features and functionality in MacFUSE 2.0. Besides the MacFUSE 2.0 release, there are still more new and interesting things to be discussed in the realm of user-space file systems. As I described and briefly demonstrated during my recent talk at the Googleplex, I wrote several new user-space file [...]

Mac OS X, like many other Unix-like operating systems, includes the “autofs” file system layer that make automatic on-demand mounting of remote resources possible. See the man page for automount(8) for more details. Such automatic mounting is orthogonal to and possible with MacFUSE. (NB: You will need MacFUSE 2.0 or above for this to work [...]

VeryBigFS is a trivial MacFUSE file system—about 60 lines of C code—that creates a huge volume with a huge file in it. “Huge” would be 512TB in this case. This is useful if you want to see how a program will deal with unusually large files. Since it is extremely unlikely for the majority of [...]

It was a little over two years ago that I gave serious thought to making user-space file systems a reality on Mac OS X. The result of that work, MacFUSE, was introduced at the Macworld conference in January 2007. Since then, MacFUSE has come a long way. It’s been used in projects big and small [...]

Next Monday (December 8, 2008), there will be an open-to-all talk on MacFUSE at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Here is a more detailed announcement.