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MacFUSE 2.0 is Here!

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 and has made numerous existing (on other platforms) and new file systems possible on Mac OS X.

MacFUSE is a native file system for Mac OS X—”native” means that it lives in the kernel, like HFS+ and AFP. However, MacFUSE doesn’t ultimately provide the file system content itself—it communicates with a standard Mac OS X application to read or write the actual file system content. Thus, MacFUSE is a file system that lets you write file systems. To do so, a developer would use one of the APIs provided by MacFUSE. MacFUSE 2.0 provides multiple APIs including, but not limited to, the FUSE API from Linux.

MacFUSE 2.0 is a major update to MacFUSE. We’ll be discussing what’s new in MacFUSE 2.0 in a talk at Google’s Mountain View headquarters today. For those who can’t be at the talk, there are two versions of the “what’s new” description.

The Apple-style version is easy to state: “improvements and bug-fixes.”

Alternatively, you can read the CHANGELOG in its entirety at the project’s web site.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Google, Mac OS X, MacFUSE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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