GO-FUSE: native bindings for the FUSE kernel module.


HIGHLIGHTS

* High speed: less than 50% slower than libfuse, using the gc
compiler.  For most real world applications, the difference will be
negligible.

* Supports in-process mounting of different FileSystems onto
subdirectories of the FUSE mount.

* Includes two fleshed out examples, zipfs and unionfs.


EXAMPLES

* examples/hello/hello.go contains a 60-line "hello world" filesystem

* zipfs/zipfs.go contains a small and simple read-only filesystem for
  zip and tar files. The corresponding command is in example/zipfs/
  For example,

    mkdir /tmp/mountpoint
    example/zipfs/zipfs /tmp/mountpoint file.zip &
    ls /tmp/mountpoint
    fusermount -u /tmp/mountpoint

* zipfs/multizipfs.go shows how to use in-process mounts to
  combine multiple Go-FUSE filesystems into a larger filesystem.
    
* fuse/loopback.go mounts another piece of the filesystem.
  Functionally, it is similar to a symlink.  A binary to run is in
  example/loopback/ . For example

    mkdir /tmp/mountpoint
    example/loopback/loopback -debug /tmp/mountpoint /some/other/directory &
    ls /tmp/mountpoint
    fusermount -u /tmp/mountpoint

* unionfs/unionfs.go: implements a union mount using 1 R/W branch, and
  multiple R/O branches.

    mkdir -p  /tmp/mountpoint /tmp/writable
    example/unionfs/unionfs /tmp/mountpoint /tmp/writable /usr &
    ls /tmp/mountpoint
    ls -l /tmp/mountpoint/bin/vi
    rm /tmp/mountpoint/bin/vi
    ls -l /tmp/mountpoint/bin/vi
    cat /tmp/writable/*DELETION*/* 

* union/autounionfs.go: creates UnionFs mounts automatically based on
  existence of READONLY symlinks.


Tested on:

- x86 32bits (Fedora 14).
- x86 64bits (Ubuntu Lucid).


BENCHMARKS

We use threaded stats over a read-only filesystem for benchmarking. A
script to do this is in example/benchmark.sh.  A libfuse baseline is
given by running the same test against archivemount
(http://www.cybernoia.de/software/archivemount/), with the locks in
its GetAttr implementation removed.

Data points (time per stat, Go-FUSE version May 1), using java 1.6
src.zip (7000 files).

platform               libfuse      Go-FUSE     difference (%)

Lenovo T60   (2cpu)    83us         99us        19%
Lenovo T400  (2cpu)    38us         58us        52%
DellT3500/Lucid (2cpu) 34us(*)      35us         3%
DellT3500/Lucid (6cpu) 59us         76us        28%

(*) libfuse does not limit the number worker threads.  In the
T3500/2cpu case, the daemon may still run on 6 CPUs (with associated
scaling overhead.)


CREDITS

* Inspired by Taru Karttunen's package, https://bitbucket.org/taruti/go-extra.

* Originally based on Ivan Krasin's https://github.com/krasin/go-fuse-zip


BUGS

Yes, probably.  Report them through golang-nuts@googlegroups.com.


KNOWN PROBLEMS

Grep source code for TODO.  Major topics:

* Missing support for file locking: FUSE_GETLK, FUSE_SETLK, FUSE_SETLKW

* Missing support for FUSE_INTERRUPT, FUSE_NOTIFY, CUSE, BMAP, POLL,
  IOCTL, STATFS

* Partial support for mounting as root (The high level FS api does not
  yet pass caller Uid/Gid/Pid)

* In the high-level API, renames are racy; See also:
  http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=27550667


LICENSE

Like Go, this library is distributed under the new BSD license.  See
accompanying LICENSE file.