OpenBSD adds fuse(4) support for adding file systems in userland

With a tiny commit log message, Sylvestre Gallon (syl@) makes a wonderfully huge change. Of course, there were tons of other commit log messages leading up to enabling fuse(4) support in OpenBSD, but this one turned on the lights so to speak. We tracked down Sylvestre to get more information on his efforts...

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	syl@	2013/11/01 07:54:45

Modified files:
	sys/conf       : GENERIC 
	lib            : Makefile 

Log message:
enable fuse.

ok deraadt@

I've always wanted to discover kernel internals in OpenBSD, and wondered about porting a kernel subsystem to OpenBSD. The first project that came to my mind was adding fuse(4) support. It would allow me to discover how a Virtual File System (VFS) works and this code could be helpful for a lot of people. Another pro was that there were already BSD implementations of fuse on FreeBSD and NetBSD. I started from the FreeBSD implementation since it was easier to understand than puffs. After some amount of work, I succeeded in adding a working fuse file system, so I sent my fuse patches to tech@ to see if I should continue my work.

I worried that some people would get mad about the poor quality of my code but instead I got a very good feedback. People like Martin Pieuchot (mpi@) helped me to change my code from a sandbox project to something that could be put into tree. A lot of changes have been done since my first post to tech@. We switched from the gpl libfuse to a rewritten libfuse with an ISC licence, added better kernel structures for fuse messaging called fusebufs and made a lot of of bug fixes. I want to thanks the OpenBSD community for their help and their great hospitality to new comers.

Thank you Sylvestre for writing to tell us the history of your work on adding fuse(4) support to OpenBSD.