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by IshKebab 151 days ago
> you need to support the ability to unlink a file from the file system and keep its data around. Want to run "vim", you need the ability to do renames and hard links

Those seem like pretty basic POSIX filesystem features to be fair. Awkward, sure... there's also awkwardness like symlinks, file locking, sticky bits and so on. But these are just things you have to implement. Are there gotchas that are inherent to FUSE itself rather than FUSE implementations?
1 comments
huntaub 151 days ago
These are basic POSIX features, but I think the high-level point that Kurt is trying to make is that building a FUSE file system signs you up for a nearly unlimited amount of compatibility work (if you want to support most applications) whereas their approach (just do a loopback ext4 fs into a large file) avoids a lot of those problems.

My expectations are that in 2026 we will see more and more developers attempt to build custom FUSE file systems and then run into the long tail of compatibility pain.

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IshKebab 151 days ago
> just do a loopback ext4 fs into a large file

How does that work with multiple clients though?

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huntaub 151 days ago
tl;dr it doesn't. I'm not sure what they're planning in this capacity (I haven't checked out sprites myself), but I would guess that it's going to be a function of "snapshots" as a mechanism to give multiple clients ephemeral write access to the same disk.
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