Mounting 9P FSs with the new macFUSE back end

[Vicente Collares]

Hello p9p folks,

I’ve recently installed Plan 9 from User Space on my Mac so that I could
once again experiment with Acme. My only previous experience with
plan9port being on Linux, I forgot that FUSE support was necessary to
use certain features of the editor. I was pleased to find that there is
software supporting FUSE file systems on macOS.

The implementation I chose, macFUSE, recently added a new back end [1]
that uses a relatively new API from Apple called FSKit [2]. This new API
allows developers to implement file systems in user space, thus removing
the need to use macOS kernel extensions (kexts). Given that kexts are no
longer recommended by Apple on security grounds [3], and that FSKit back
ends are easier to install, I think the new one is a definite
improvement for people on macOS.

To mount the file system used by Acme, I’ve tried the following command:

$ 9pfuse -D `namespace`/acme ~/mnt/acme

but that uses the old back end.

Could someone on this list please provide guidance on how to use the new
one? If I can help it, I would rather avoid having to install a kext.

Happy holidays,
Vicente
vic...@collares.ca

[1] https://github.com/macfuse/macfuse/wiki/FUSE-Backends#fskit-api
[2] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fskit
[3]
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/deployment/depa5fb8376f/web#:~:text=Important,instead