Mini-FS is a containerized filesystem built on FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace). It operates by mounting a container file, allowing all files and directories created within the mount point to be stored within this container file.

• Installation
• Usage
• Limitations and Optimization Opportunities
• License

This project has been tested on Archlinux with Rust 1.77.

This project relies on the following crates:

• FUSE and the Rust crate fuser for handling filesystem-related calls.
• notify-rust for desktop notifications.
• serde and bincode for binary serialization.
• heapless for easily serializable structures.
• clap for parsing command-line parameters.
• anyhow for handling errors throughout the entire program.

[FUSE for Linux] is available in most Linux distributions and usually called fuse or fuse3. See installation guide for most distributions.

cargo build

Mini-FS includes unit tests that can be executed as follows:

cargo test

Additionally, there's a basic filesystem test script provided. After mounting a container filesystem on mountpoint/ (refer to usage), run the following command:

./test.sh mountpoint

This script conducts file creation, reading, writing, and deletion operations based on basic shell operations.

To mount the container file container_file to ./mountpoint/, follow these steps:

mkdir mountpoint
./target/debug/mini-fs mountpoint container_file

Once mounted, you can use mountpoint/ as a directory, and all files and directories will be stored in container_file. For example:

mkdir mountpoint/ocean
echo "Whale swim like otters" > mountpoint/ocean/whale.txt
cat mountpoint/ocean/whale.txt

This creates a directory ocean inside mountpoint/, writes a text file whale.txt with the specified content, and then displays the contents of whale.txt.

Mini-FS features a basic notification system that can be enabled using the option -n or --allow-notification.

To enable notifications, use one of the following commands:

./target/debug/mini-fs mountpoint container_file -n
./target/debug/mini-fs mountpoint container_file --allow-notification

However, be cautious as enabling this feature may result in frequent notifications, which could potentially become very annoying.

Mini-FS is not a fully-fledged filesystem and lacks several operations, including:

• Removing a directory.
• Changing file permissions (currently fixed at 777).
• Renaming files or directories.
• Names limited to 30 bytes.
• (Probably) not thread-safe.

Additionally, the container structure exhibits some inefficiencies that could be addressed for improved performance:

• Excessive read and write operations.
• Failure to release sectors when directories or files are truncated.
• Absence of a cache system.
• Fragmentation issues.

Dual-licensed under Apache 2.0 or MIT.