mfusepy 3.1.0

Ctypes bindings for the high-level API in libfuse 2 and 3

mfusepy

mfusepy is a Python module that provides a simple interface to FUSE and macFUSE. It's just one file and is implemented using ctypes to use libfuse.

Installation

Via PyPI:

pip install mfusepy

You also need to install the fuse (2) or fuse3 package on your system.

Versioning

This version tries to follow Semantic Versioning. If you depend on this project, you should fix the major version, or else you risk your project breaking on a newer version release! E.g., in your pyproject.toml:

dependencies = ["mfusepy ~= 1.1",]

If you have tested with multiple major versions and they are known to work, you can relax the constraint for maximum compatibility:

dependencies = ["mfusepy >= 1.1, < 3.0",]

About this fork

This is a fork of fusepy because it did not see any development for over 6 years. Refuse was an attempt to fork fusepy, but it has not seen any development for over 4 years. Among many metadata changes, it contains two bugfixes to the high-level API, which I have redone in this fork. See also the discussion in this issue. I intend to maintain this fork as long as I maintain ratarmount, which is now over 5 years old.

The main motivations for the fork are:

• FUSE 3 support. Based on the libfuse changelog, the amount of breaking changes should be fairly small. It should be possible to simply update these ten or so changed structs and functions in the existing fusepy.
• Translation layer performance. In benchmarks for a simple find call that lists all files, some callbacks such as readdir turned out to be significantly limited by converting Python dictionaries to ctype structs. The idea would be to expose the ctype structs to the fusepy caller.
  • Much of the performance was lost trying to populate the stat struct even though only the mode and inode member are used by the kernel FUSE API.

The prefix m in the name stands for anything you want it to: "multi" because multiple libfuse versions are supported, "modded", "modern", or "Maximilian".

Comparison with other libraries

High-level interface support (path-based)

Project	License	Dependants	Notes
fusepy	ISC	63	The most popular Python-bindings, but unfortunately unmaintained for 6+ years.
python-fuse	LGPL	12	Written directly in C interfacing with fuse.h and exposing it via Python.h. Only supports libfuse2, not libfuse3.
refuse	ISC	3	Dead fork of fusepy with many other dead forks: [1] [2]
fusepyng	ISC	0	Dead fork of fusepy. GitHub repo has been force-pushed as a statement. Fork here.
userspacefs	GPL3 (why not ISC?)	1	Fork of fusepyng/fusepy. Gated behind a self-hosted solution with no possibility to open issues or pull requests.
fusepy3	ISC	Not on PyPI	Fork of fusepy for the fox-it/dissect ecosystem to add libfuse3 support. Seems to drop libfuse2 support and does not appear to work around the ABI incompatibilities between libfuse3 minor versions. Last updated 1.5 years ago. Looks like publish-and-forget, or it may simply have no bugs.

Low-level interface support (inode/int-based)

All these libraries only wrap the low-level libfuse interface, which works with inodes instead of paths, and therefore are not (easily) usable for my use case. In the end, there is mostly only some path-to-hash table in the high-level libfuse API, but it is cumbersome to implement and performance-critical.

Project	License	Dependants	Notes
pyfuse3	LGPL	9	ReadMe contains: "Warning - no longer developed!".
llfuse	LGPL	2	ReadMe contains: "Warning - no longer developed!".
arvados-llfuse	LGPL	1	Fork of llfuse, but less up to date?
aliyundrive-fuse	MIT	0	Alibaba Cloud Disk FUSE disk mounting. "This repository has been archived by the owner on Mar 28, 2023". Documentation is only in Chinese. Read-only support. Multiple fizzled-out forks: pikpak-fuse, alist-fuse

Examples

See some examples of how you can use mfusepy:

Example	Description
memory	A simple memory filesystem
loopback	A loopback filesystem
context	Sample usage of fuse_get_context()
sftp	A simple SFTP filesystem (requires paramiko)

Platforms

mfusepy requires FUSE 2.6 (or later) and runs on:

• Linux (i386, x86_64, PPC, arm64, MIPS)
• macOS (Apple Silicon, Intel)
• FreeBSD (i386, amd64)
• NetBSD (amd64)
• OpenBSD (amd64)

While FUSE is (at least in the Unix world) a Linux kernel feature, several user space libraries exist for easy access. libfuse acts as the reference implementation.

• libfuse (Linux, FreeBSD) (fuse.h 2 3)
• libfuse (OpenBSD) (fuse.h 2)
• librefuse (NetBSD) through PUFFS (fuse.h 2)
• macFUSE (macOS), previously called osxfuse, (fuse.h 2 3)
• MacFUSE (macOS), no longer maintained
• FUSE-T (macOS), GitHub
• WinFsp (Windows) (fuse.h 2 3)
• Dokany (Windows) (fuse.h 2)
• Dokan (Windows), no longer maintained

Known Dependents

• Megatron-Energon
• ninfs
• ratarmount