An Introduction to Userspace Filesystem Development
25 April 2012 | ACCU Conference, Oxford UK
Session Information
Abstract
Writing a filesystem can be very cool. Alas, writing a filesystem is also very hard. This is mainly because coding in the kernel is hard. Thankfully, most of the pain can be avoided by using a library like FUSE. Such libraries enable filesystems to be expressed as simple userspace programmes by taking care of all that tedious mucking about in kernel space.
This talk will look at the Why and How of such filesystem development, using FUSE on UNIX. The talk will be very practical, with code on the screen and maybe even written in front of your very eyes (if I’m feeling brave).
There will be a short recap of how the VFS works on UNIX and then we’ll dive into writing a filesystem with FUSE.
I’ll go over my experiences of developing such filesystems - architectural patterns, testing, performance, etc. There will also be a section on the behaviours and gotchas of the libraries involved.
Recording
None known