Low-level FUSE file system boilerplate

This project is a bare bones implementation of an in-memory FUSE file system that uses the low-level FUSE interface. It passes a large percentage of the POSIX compliance test suite (some things like unix sockets aren't yet handled), is regularly stress tested with numerous workloads, and can serve as a good starting point for your next file system project.

Many FUSE file systems found out in the wild use the high-level FUSE interface that operates on file paths. In contrast to the path-based interface, the low-level interface in FUSE operates on inodes, and offers a lot of flexibility. However, there seems to be relatively few examples of how to build a file system with this more advanced interface.

Testing Process

The testing we perform focuses on support across many distributions, compliance to the POSIX standard, and stress testing with many workloads. Continuous integration builds and mounts the file system for a variety of OS distributions. In addition, the continuous integration process runs the Tuxera POSIX test suite on Ubuntu Trusty.

A broader set of tests are periodically run (e.g. before new releases) that exercise the file system using a variety of real-world workloads. Interestingly, during development, a significant number of issues were surfaced by running real applications that did not show up when using the POSIX test suite. This larger set of test is not run as part of the continuous integration process because they either take too long or require too much memory.

The set of tests can be found in the test/ directory. A selection:

• Run the Tuxera POSIX test suite (test/posix.sh)
• Build the Linux kernel (test/kernel.sh)
• Build the Ceph storage system (test/ceph.sh)
• Multiple configurations of iozone (test/iozone.sh)
• Build PostgreSQL and run tests (test/postgres.sh)
• Build Git and run unit tests (test/git.sh)