Files
Antonio S. MusumeciandClaude Sonnet 5 8eed256747 Restore splice zero-copy I/O as runtime options
Reinstate the splice read/write/move paths removed in 84592a9f, now
gated behind runtime options with negotiated pipe sizing and fallback
logging.

- Transport: msgbuf-piped splice receive, fd-referenced splice reply
  (vmsplice + splice), splice-move pipe-bounce, and restored
  fuse_buf_copy/fuse_buf_flags plumbing for copy fallbacks
- Negotiation: new pipe-max-size option (auto-raised at INIT when
  possible; the sysctl read/write is factored into src/pipe_max_size.cpp
  so fuse_init.cpp and option_parser.cpp share one implementation);
  fuse-msg-size clamped to what the pipe can hold; splice is disabled
  at INIT with a warning if the sysctl can't fit even the minimum,
  retracting the FUSE_CAP_SPLICE_* bits already advertised to the
  kernel in that case
- Read replies and splice-move are gated at 128 KiB (below that the
  syscalls cost more than the copy they avoid); every fallback path
  degrades to the copy path and logs once per process via SysLog
- msgbuf pipe cache is process-global and mutex-guarded (mutex_lockguard)
  so pipes can move between read and worker threads under
  process-thread mode
- API simplified after review: collapsed the three per-axis options
  (splice-read/write/move) into a single splice boolean (default on);
  no-splice-read/write/move and the bare splice-read/write/move
  spellings stay registered as accepted no-ops so existing mount
  options don't fail the mount, but they do NOT alter the splice
  knob - upgraders with no-splice-* in their config get splice
  enabled and must set splice=false explicitly (see
  deprecated_options.md)
- Fixed several correctness issues found in parallel review: a
  dropped write_buf registration that silently corrupted writes, a
  dirty-pipe reuse bug in msgbuf_free, an iov double-send in
  fuse_reply_data's splice-move fallback, and pipe-capacity math that
  assumed a 4096-byte page size
- Modernized the transport/negotiation code to this codebase's C++
  style: RAII (unique_ptr/DEFER) instead of malloc/free and manual fd
  close(), std::from_chars/to_chars instead of stoul/snprintf,
  _ReplyPipe's pipe ops as methods instead of free functions closing
  over a thread_local global, and vendored/libfuse/lib/buffer.cpp (a
  near-verbatim port of upstream's buffer.c) brought in line with the
  rest of the fork
- Documented splice and pipe-max-size options (mkdocs, FAQ,
  deprecated-options list); added tools/bench-splice.sh
- Benchmarked on tmpfs: seq_write +21%, seq_read +52%, small_write
  +5%, small_read +12%; validated with a 1h soak (~271 GiB
  hash-verified I/O, zero integrity failures), a live-mount round-trip
  of I/O above the splice threshold, and the existing unit/smoke
  suites at their pre-existing baseline

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 11:24:16 -04:00
..
2026-05-06 20:49:46 -04:00

libfuse

Warning: unresolved security issue

Be aware that FUSE has an unresolved security bug (bug #15): the permission check for accessing a cached directory is only done once when the directory entry is first loaded into the cache. Subsequent accesses will re-use the results of the first check, even if the directory permissions have since changed, and even if the subsequent access is made by a different user.

This bug needs to be fixed in the Linux kernel and has been known since 2006 but unfortunately no fix has been applied yet. If you depend on correct permission handling for FUSE file systems, the only workaround is to completely disable caching of directory entries. Alternatively, the severity of the bug can be somewhat reduced by not using the allow_other mount option.

About

FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) is an interface for userspace programs to export a filesystem to the Linux kernel. The FUSE project consists of two components: the fuse kernel module (maintained in the regular kernel repositories) and the libfuse userspace library (maintained in this repository). libfuse provides the reference implementation for communicating with the FUSE kernel module.

A FUSE file system is typically implemented as a standalone application that links with libfuse. libfuse provides functions to mount the file system, unmount it, read requests from the kernel, and send responses back. libfuse offers two APIs: a "high-level", synchronous API, and a "low-level" asynchronous API. In both cases, incoming requests from the kernel are passed to the main program using callbacks. When using the high-level API, the callbacks may work with file names and paths instead of inodes, and processing of a request finishes when the callback function returns. When using the low-level API, the callbacks must work with inodes and responses must be sent explicitly using a separate set of API functions.

Installation

./configure
make -j8
make install

You may also need to add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and/or run ldconfig. If you're building from the git repository (instead of using a release tarball), you also need to run ./makeconf.sh to create the configure script.

You'll also need a fuse kernel module (Linux kernels 2.6.14 or later contain FUSE support).

For more details see the file INSTALL

Security implications

If you run make install, the fusermount program is installed set-user-id to root. This is done to allow normal users to mount their own filesystem implementations.

There must however be some limitations, in order to prevent Bad User from doing nasty things. Currently those limitations are:

  • The user can only mount on a mountpoint, for which it has write permission

  • The mountpoint is not a sticky directory which isn't owned by the user (like /tmp usually is)

  • No other user (including root) can access the contents of the mounted filesystem (though this can be relaxed by allowing the use of the allow_other and allow_root mount options in fuse.conf)

Building your own filesystem

FUSE comes with several example file systems in the examples directory. For example, the fusexmp example mirrors the contents of the root directory under the mountpoint. Start from there and adapt the code!

The documentation of the API functions and necessary callbacks is mostly contained in the files include/fuse.h (for the high-level API) and include/fuse_lowlevel.h (for the low-level API). An autogenerated html version of the API is available in the doc/html directory and at http://libfuse.github.io/doxygen.

Getting Help

If you need help, please ask on the fuse-devel@lists.sourceforge.net mailing list (subscribe at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fuse-devel).

Please report any bugs on the GitHub issue tracker at https://github.com/libfuse/main/issues.