[$] FUSE status and plans
Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) maintainer Miklos Szeredi led a birds-of-a-feather (BoF) discussion about the subsystem at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit . In it, he talked about maintenance challenges, proposed features and their status, and his plans for a new FUSE API. There is a lot of interest and activity in the FUSE community these days it seems.
Miklos Szeredi, maintainer of Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE), addressed maintenance challenges, proposed features, and his plans for a new FUSE API during a birds-of-a-feather (BoF) discussion at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. The FUSE community has shown significant interest and activity recently.
Szeredi discussed the importance of keeping bugs out while allowing features in as a maintainer, suggesting that FUSE could benefit from having a co-maintainer. Despite some suggestions from attendees, no one volunteered to co-maintain FUSE itself.
Pending features included Darrick Wong's iomap-based user-space API, John Groves' famfs patches, Joanne Koong's zero-copy support for io_uring, compound commands from Horst Birthelmer, a file handle user-space API by Luis Henriques, the io_uring buffer size discussion led by Bernd Schubert, and Koong's large folio support for FUSE. Szeredi also worked on restructuring and cleaning up the FUSE API, separating the transport and filesystem layers, and splitting up large files.
The user-space API for FUSE, which is over 20 years old, requires a clean-slate implementation. Szeredi created a slim 2,000-line API called fusex, but it currently supports only local filesystems and synchronous operations. He envisions fusex as a new major version of the protocol, separate from the existing FUSE implementation.
Ted Ts'o raised concerns about FUSE filesystems on non-Linux platforms, such as macOS and Windows, where users encounter difficulties with the existing API. He advocated for a simpler user-space API and expressed interest in native FUSE development on macOS, despite Apple's kernel-code restrictions.
Written by urgent.news from LWN's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
