Taming Mac OS X File Systems

Begin forwarded message:

From: Monty Solomon <monty <at> roscom.com>
Date: January 12, 2007 2:36:33 AM EST
To: undisclosed-recipient:;
Subject: Taming Mac OS X File Systems

Taming Mac OS X File Systems
1/11/2007 11:57:00 AM

Posted by Amit Singh, Mac Engineering Manager

Google is a fantastic company to work for. I could cite numerous
reasons why. Take the concept of "20 percent time." Google engineers
are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time pursuing projects
they're passionate about. I started one such exciting project some
time back, and I'm pleased to announce that Google is releasing the
fruits of this project as an open source contribution to the
Macintosh community. That project is MacFUSE, a Mac OS X version of
the popular FUSE (File System in User Space) mechanism, which was
created for Linux and subsequently ported to FreeBSD.

FUSE makes it possible to implement a very functional file system in
a normal program rather than requiring a complex addition to the
operating system. More importantly, the FUSE API is very easy to
program for. The large number of interesting and/or useful FUSE file
systems out there is a testament to this. An often-cited example of
such a useful file system is sshfs, which until now was not available
on Mac OS X.