Status of the Project

[Aram Hăvărneanu]

Hello,

It appears Upspin development has all but stopped, which is a shame,
because there's nothing quite like it. What are the plans for the
project in the future?

Thanks!

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Aram Hăvărneanu

[David Presotto]

I just started playing again trying to merge in other people's changes to get upspinfs working on Macos again. Unfortunately Brazil fuse has dropped Mac support so i have to branch an earlier version or go to something else entirely.

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[David Presotto]

s/Brazil/bazil/ friggin spelling correction on my phone...

[Aram Hăvărneanu]

Perhaps there's a way to leverage the undocumented 9P support in
macOS. It seems to work for sharing the host filesystem to en emulated
macOS VM, but I am not sure if it's possible to use that to do a
loopback mount on the same machine, as I think the only transport
supported is over PCI.

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Aram Hăvărneanu

[Aram Hăvărneanu]

It should be possible, however, to do a NFS or CIFS loopback mount.

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Aram Hăvărneanu

[salmān]

speaking of barely documented macos frameworks, i noticed there's
been a file provider extension for since macos 11. it's similar to
what ios has for its files app.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider

i tried to play with this and managed to get a couple of file icons
to appear in finder, but failed to find where they are mounted if
at all.

salman

[Aram Hăvărneanu]

I don't think those are mounted anywhere, I think it's purely a
Files.app thing. When you open a file, you get a copy of it in some
temporary directory. Might be ok for opening a picture, but I don't
think it's useful for command line work, like dealing with source
code.

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Aram Hăvărneanu

[salmān]

i thought that might be the case, however this video from wwdc
suggests this is somehow done in apfs. the demo shows reading a
text file from a shell. looks like it blocks until the full file
is downloaded.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10182/

i last tinkered with this around the start of the year. maybe
something changed since, or i might have just been holding it wrong.
most likely the latter.

using exp.upspin.io/client/gobind from swift to write an upspin
client for this might be something worth exploring.

salman

[Aram Hăvărneanu]

Interesting, yes, this should be suitable.

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Aram Hăvărneanu

[Aram Hăvărneanu]

> yes, this should be suitable.

Or perhaps not.

AFAICT this relies on files *on disk* which are SF_DATALESS. But
the files have to be on disk already. You can't chdir(2) into an
invisible directory which will spawn into existence. The directory
has to already be on disk as SF_DATALESS, which means that this
might work for your user root directory, but it can't realize the
unified global namespace. Essentially every new user root that you
want to access would need to be a new "domain".

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Aram Hăvărneanu

[Ged Wed]

File provider info... 

There have been so many problems with Fuse. I lean towards writing OS specific File Providers...

Some good info here on the MAC / IOS File Provider.

https://www.apriorit.com/dev-blog/730-mac-how-to-work-with-the-file-provider-for-macos

For Windows and Linux i am not sure yet.

[Ged Wed]

a simple example for MAC and IOS here: https://github.com/peterthomashorn/macosfileproviderexample

[Aram Hăvărneanu]

The problem with that API is that it doesn't have any kind of support
for a global namespace. That is, the names of all files must be
prepopulated on the client side. You can't chdir(2) into a
non-existent directory, for example.

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Aram Hăvărneanu

[Ged Wed]

I see your point and thank you for the reply. I wonder if it's the
same mechanism Google drives and others use ?

[Ged Wed]

https://github.com/tarndt/usbd is an interesting way to do it !!


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