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OS X Operating Systems Software

FUSE Port Brings NTFS Support To OS X 150

Posted by kdawson from the circuit-breaker dept.
sciurus0 writes "In his session at Macworld on OS X filesytems, Google's Amit Singh announced that he has ported Linux's FUSE module to OS X. The port is called MacFUSE and it is available in source form and as a pre-compiled kernel extension with associated tools. Many FUSE filesystems such as sshfs and ntfs-3g are reported to work."
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FUSE Port Brings NTFS Support To OS X More

FUSE Port Brings NTFS Support To OS X

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  • GmailFS also (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @05:53AM (#17643608)
    GmailFS [jones.name] should also now be easily supported on Mac OS X using MacFuse.

  • FUSE for Windows (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @05:53AM (#17643614)
    I'm writing FUSE for Windows at my spare time (not much of it, unfortunately). Is there anybody who's doing the same?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by j-pimp ( 177072 )
      Is this going to use the same modules as FUSE for linux? This sounds interesting. I'm willing to test when you feel reasonable it won't make my machine particularly unstable for windows.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by thaig ( 415462 )
      Intriguing idea. Have you got a website for this effort?

      I have been thinking about making a FUSE filesystem for Linux and having it on Windows as well would be a great advantage.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cyberax ( 705495 )
        Not yet, I'm slowly rewriting parts of ext2 driver for Windows. It's in my private SVN repository and I can't figure out how to upload it to Google.Code or SF.net without losing history.

        I hope to have my very own Slashdot story when I finish porting :)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Azarael ( 896715 )
          Maybe a sript like cvstosvn could be modified to do a full project(starting from ci #1) co and ci into the target repo? It might put a lot of traffic on target server, but I can't see why it couldn't work.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Cyberax ( 705495 )
            A fellow ./er told me that it's possible to use SVK to push changes from one repository to another. I'll try to do it during my next weekend.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Azarael ( 896715 )
          Correction, I meant cvs2svn
          Here's the project page http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/ [tigris.org]
    • This would be great, as then Windows would be able to read (and presumably write) to HFS+ file systems. I could finally use my Mac-formatted iPod on a windows machine!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Foolhardy ( 664051 )
      I have thought about porting FUSE in the past, since it'd be a great way to enable lots of filesystems in Windows but haven't gotten out of the planning stage. I'd be very interested in helping to make that happen. I have some experience [dyndns.org] in writing Windows NT filesystem drivers.

      I don't know how you've planned the userspace, but I'd suggest that you make it NOT dependent on Win32. It'd be much easier to implement features like fork (which Win32 doesn't support, but native processes do). Also, native process

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by teridon ( 139550 )
      Would using Microsoft Services for UNIX [microsoft.com] help you port it?

  • The creator of FUSE... (Score:5, Informative)

    by little1973 ( 467075 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @06:24AM (#17643750)
    ...Miklos Szeredi was offered a job by SUSE Labs, Prague, which he accepted. His job will be kernel developement for SUSE (all GPL, of course). IIRC, he can work on FUSE in 10% of his work time.

  • Precompiled read/write NTFS packages (Score:5, Informative)

    by irgu ( 673471 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @06:36AM (#17643812)
    The original NTFS-3G [ntfs-3g.org] source code doesn't compile on Mac OS X without some changes but the MacFUSE and NTFS-3G precompiled packages [iusethis.com] are available from IUseThis.

  • Great for dual booting? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @06:45AM (#17643862) Homepage
    Boot camp users, care to comment on the implications?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by LEgregius ( 550408 )
      I have bootcamp installed. I can already READ my ntfs partition from OS X. No write support. FUSE does have some write support, so that's handy. I may use it.

  • Great News! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @07:07AM (#17643964) Homepage Journal
    This is great news! Finally, there's an easy way to develop filesystems for multiple operating systems. Maybe I'll pick up my netfs project again now. Anyone working on porting FUSE to *BSD?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jack_csk ( 644290 )
      I'm not sure about NetBSD and OpenBSD, but then fusefs support is already in FreeBSD.

      By the way, I have decided not to upgrade my OS X until Apple includes out-of-the-box sshfs (that's the one I used the most among those built on top of fuse) support into new version of the OS.
    • Care to share your ideas on this netfs project of yours? I was planning something similar...

      But more seriously, I'd pick a platform and stick to it -- and right now I like Linux, because it's so ubiquitous. If you're looking for a cross-platform way of developing filesystems, you might consider trying some sort of wrapper library in-kernel, though...

      Because FUSE is slow, and FUSE will always be slow. The way I understand it, even a filesystem that creates exactly one file that simply reads "hello, world", i
      • ``Care to share your ideas on this netfs project of yours?''

        The main idea was to first make a simple read only filesystem that Just Works. That part is basically done, except there is no kernel driver yet. Then, the filesystem would be extended with permissions (done right; not based on uids like in NFS) and write support. Eventually, it's on to replication and perhaps distribution.

        ``But more seriously, I'd pick a platform and stick to it''

        I would, but writing filesystem drivers for any platform is a PITA.

        • Then, the filesystem would be extended with permissions (done right; not based on uids like in NFS) and write support.

          Hmm. How does that look? I can see some sort of mapping local uids to remote uids, or more advanced schemes like ACLs, but other than that...

          Eventually, it's on to replication and perhaps distribution.

          I'm guessing that means a file can be stored on more than one machine, and it will be cached on-disk locally? Basically, like coda, but open?

          Sounds good!

          I doubt that matters when you're in

          • ``Then, the filesystem would be extended with permissions (done right; not based on uids like in NFS) and write support.

            Hmm. How does that look? I can see some sort of mapping local uids to remote uids, or more advanced schemes like ACLs, but other than that...''

            I'm thinking just authentication to the netfs server. Any kind of authentication could be implemented, and any mapping between netfs accounts and system accounts on the system the server runs on. I still have to think about it.

            ``Eventually, it's on

            • Yes, but you're still incurring context switches and network latency, which I imagine adds up to more than the FUSE overhead.

              Consider NFS. With NFS, you have exactly the number of context switches you would on a local FS -- you go app -> kernel -> remote kernel -> kernel -> app. The kernel is doing all the network stuff, all the filesystem stuff, and all the NFS stuff.

              But definitely once you get into caching -- I know you're putting that off, and I'd also encourage you to look at the fscache

  • I use it everyday...

    # which mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs

    • Re:Doh. mount_ntfs is already there (Score:5, Informative)

      by irgu ( 673471 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @07:39AM (#17644166)
      Mount_ntfs doesn't have full read/write possibility. NTFS-3G [ntfs-3g.org] has and it's commonly used on Linux.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by slamb ( 119285 ) *
      From the manpage, mount_ntfs(8) has significant limitations:

      There is limited writing ability. Limitations: file must be nonresident and must not contain any sparces (uninitialized areas); compressed files are also not supported.

      I can't seem to find a straight definition of "nonresident files" in the context of NTFS, but my best guess from glancing over google results is that "resident" files are ones which have their contents in a small block embedded in the inode itself. That'd be an o

  • Great! (Score:3, Informative)

    by jack_csk ( 644290 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @08:16AM (#17644334)
    I was waiting for the sshfs support on Mac OS X for a long time.
    Thanks Google, you did us OS X users a great favorite!
    • It's a great tool and one I have practical use for, but testing it out for work I've stumbled across what I consider to be an important issue. I've only tried SSHFS so far, and I haven't done any digging to see where the fault lies, but a dropped connection (either a dropped internet connection or an SSH session the server drops) really confuses the system. Messing about, I killed my internet connection during a read, and Finder hung until my the connection was restored. Another time, my session was killed
  • Sounds less stupid than Sing is King!... But if you have been to his site in the last three years he really has more Raw understanding of the Mac, and incidentally just about every other OS that you have never heard of. Undoubtably he is the pulse of a new mac future.

    macFuse... Now that I will reserve judgement on. I am sure that it works at least a little, in the same way that HFS and NTFS were based on OS 2\Warp's HPFS, but having R\W support means I can now fix any ai
  • That's exactly the feature I expected This has always been a great concern for me, as I have no available Linux box at work. But now I am finally empowered to completely fuck up my NFTS partition and ruin gygabytes fo data and months of work from both, work and home. I love it! The perfect complement to NTFS' own native goodness!

  • How about ext3? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @09:27AM (#17644848)
    How about ext3 support on Intel macs? I tried the sourceforge project about a year ago and it didn't work.

  • genneral problem with FUSE (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hswerdfe ( 569925 ) <slashdot.org@nOS ... d.swerdfeger.com> on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @10:46AM (#17646028) Homepage Journal
    I love fuse it makes so many things so much easier.
    mainly I use "sshfs". but the biggest problem I have is the same problem I have with KDE-IOSlaves.
    is that you can't really chain them

    It makes it easy to Open a Zip/Rar file as a folder, and it makes it easy to treat an FTP server as a folder. but what about a Zip File on an FTP server?

    I just wish there was some easy way to allow the FTP/SSH file systems to recognize that a Zip File as folder.

    or chain to Zip with Encryption.
    or Encryption with Subversion.
    all at the file system level.
    any way thats my rant, but the FUSE effort is brilliant in general.

    • It makes it easy to Open a Zip/Rar file as a folder, and it makes it easy to treat an FTP server as a folder. but what about a Zip File on an FTP server?

      Mount the FTP server as a file system. Once you've done that, you now have, in your file system name space, a Zip file. Mount that Zip file. References to it, or the files in it, will be passed to the user-space zipfs, which will do I/O to the Zip file. That I/O will be passed to the user-space ftpfs, which will do FTP operations to get the file's con

  • Cocoa Fuse GUI (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mgorbach228 ( 938559 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @01:07PM (#17648348)
    I'm working on a Cocoa GUI for FUSE (currently called MacFusion). The idea is that it loads plugins for supported filesystems (working right now on SSHFS, NTFS-3G and FTPFS at first). The plugins provide a configuration interface and code to mount/unmount. I'm hoping that this GUI will make FUSE goodness easily accessible to non-technical non-console people. In the future, it should be simple to support encfs, gmailfs, etc. This will be a FOSS project once a first build is ready. Anyone who wants to help is welcome, as are suggestions of any kind on the features/interface.

  • Tried it and comments (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @01:58PM (#17649204) Homepage Journal
    On reading about this I decided to install it on my Mac and see what it gives. While a great advancement, this is still a work in progress and still very much something for people familiar with the command line. The aspect that would change all this the ability to use FUSE based FS URLs in the Finder ( known issue [google.com] ), though this seems to be a limitation based on some private APIs needing to be made public, which I hope Apple resolves.

    • ...though this seems to be a limitation based on some private APIs needing to be made public, which I hope Apple resolves.

      To be precise, it's a limitation on a private plugin interface needing to be made public. Making an interface public means committing to the interface, making it harder to make changes if a design decision made at time T turns out not to have been the right thing to do at time T plus delta T. (That particular interface might well change very significantly in future releases. It might

  • There is ZFS for FUSE, and the next MacOS X will have ZFS native. Compare them.
  • At work we have Windows 2000 workstations locked down to where we are not able to install anything. This is good, but it leaves us no choice but to use USB key drives and portable apps if we want to run things like Firefox.

    I have an iPod formatted for Mac and YamiPod won't read it on those Windows 2000 machines, and I have no option of installing something like MacDrive on the machine to do so.

    Perhaps I could use something like FUSE.

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