fuse - configuration and mount options for FUSE file systems
FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) is a simple interface for userspace
programs to export a virtual filesystem to the Linux kernel. FUSE also aims
to provide a secure method for non privileged users to create and mount
their own filesystem implementations.
- FUSE
- The in-kernel filesystem that forwards requests to a user-space
process.
- filesystem
- The user-space process that responds to requests received from the
kernel.
- libfuse
- The shared library that most (user-space) filesystems use to communicate
with FUSE (the kernel filesystem). libfuse also provides the
fusermount3 (or fusermount if you have older version of
libfuse) helper to allow non-privileged users to mount filesystems.
- filesystem
owner
- The user that starts the filesystem and instructs the kernel to associate
it with a particular mountpoint. The latter is typically done by the
filesystem itself on start-up. When using libfuse, this is done by calling
the fusermount3 utility.
- client
- Any process that interacts with the mountpoint.
Most of the generic mount options described in mount are
supported (ro, rw, suid, nosuid, dev,
nodev, exec, noexec, atime, noatime,
sync, async, dirsync). Filesystems are mounted with
nodev,nosuid by default, which can only be overridden by a privileged
user.
These are FUSE specific mount options that can be specified for
all filesystems:
- default_permissions
- This option instructs the kernel to perform its own permission check
instead of deferring all permission checking to the filesystem. The check
by the kernel is done in addition to any permission checks by the
filesystem, and both have to succeed for an operation to be allowed. The
kernel performs a standard UNIX permission check (based on mode bits and
ownership of the directory entry, and uid/gid of the client).
This mount option is activated implicitly if the filesystem
enables ACL support during the initial feature negotiation when opening
the device fd. In this case, the kernel performs both ACL and standard
unix permission checking.
Filesystems that do not implement any permission checking
should generally add this option internally.
- allow_other
- This option overrides the security measure restricting file access to the
filesystem owner, so that all users (including root) can access the
files.
- rootmode=M
- Specifies the the file mode of the filesystem's root (in octal
representation).
- blkdev
- Mount a filesystem backed by a block device. This is a privileged option.
The device must be specified with the fsname=NAME option.
- blksize=N
- Set the block size for the filesystem. This option is only valid for
'fuseblk' type mounts. The default is 512.
In most cases, this option should not be specified by the
filesystem owner but set internally by the filesystem.
- max_read=N
- With this option the maximum size of read operations can be set. The
default is infinite, but typically the kernel enforces its own limit in
addition to this one. A value of zero corresponds to no limit.
This option should not be specified by the filesystem owner.
The correct (or optimum) value depends on the filesystem implementation
and should thus be set by the filesystem internally.
This mount option is deprecated in favor of direct negotiation
over the device fd (as done for e.g. the maximum size of write
operations). For the time being, libfuse-using filesystems that want to
limit the read size must therefore use this mount option and set
the same value again in the init() handler.
- fd=N
- The file descriptor to use for communication between the userspace
filesystem and the kernel. The file descriptor must have been obtained by
opening the FUSE device (/dev/fuse).
This option should not be specified by the filesystem owner.
It is set by libfuse (or, if libfuse is not used, must be set by the
filesystem itself).
- user_id=N
- group_id=N Specifies the numeric uid/gid of the mount owner.
This option should not be specified by the filesystem owner.
It is set by libfuse (or, if libfuse is not used, must be set by the
filesystem itself).
- fsname=NAME
- Sets the filesystem source (first field in /etc/mtab). The default
is the name of the filesystem process.
- subtype=TYPE
- Sets the filesystem type (third field in /etc/mtab). The default is
the name of the filesystem process. If the kernel suppports it,
/etc/mtab and /proc/mounts will show the filesystem type as
fuse.TYPE
If the kernel doesn't support subtypes, the source field will
be TYPE#NAME, or if fsname option is not specified, just
TYPE.
These following options are not actually passed to the kernel but
interpreted by libfuse. They can be specified for all filesystems that use
libfuse:
- allow_root
- This option is similar to allow_other but file access is limited to
the filesystem owner and root. This option and allow_other are
mutually exclusive.
- auto_unmount
- This option enables automatic release of the mountpoint if filesystem
terminates for any reason. Normally the filesystem is responsible for
releasing the mountpoint, which means that the mountpoint becomes
inaccessible if the filesystem terminates without first unmounting.
At the moment, this option implies that the filesystem will
also be mounted with nodev and nosuid (even when mounted
by root). This restriction may be lifted in the future.
These following options are not actually passed to the kernel but
interpreted by libfuse. They can only be specified for filesystems that use
the high-level libfuse API:
- kernel_cache
- This option disables flushing the cache of the file contents on every
open(2). This should only be enabled on filesystems, where the file
data is never changed externally (not through the mounted FUSE
filesystem). Thus it is not suitable for network filesystems and other
"intermediate" filesystems.
NOTE: if this option is not specified (and neither
direct_io) data is still cached after the open(2), so a
read(2) system call will not always initiate a read
operation.
- auto_cache
- This option is an alternative to kernel_cache. Instead of
unconditionally keeping cached data, the cached data is invalidated on
open(2) if the modification time or the size of the file has
changed since it was last opened.
- umask=M
- Override the permission bits in st_mode set by the filesystem. The
resulting permission bits are the ones missing from the given umask value.
The value is given in octal representation.
- uid=N
- Override the st_uid field set by the filesystem (N is
numeric).
- gid=N
- Override the st_gid field set by the filesystem (N is
numeric).
- entry_timeout=T
- The timeout in seconds for which name lookups will be cached. The default
is 1.0 second. For all the timeout options, it is possible to give
fractions of a second as well (e.g. entry_timeout=2.8)
- negative_timeout=T
- The timeout in seconds for which a negative lookup will be cached. This
means, that if file did not exist (lookup returned ENOENT), the
lookup will only be redone after the timeout, and the file/directory will
be assumed to not exist until then. The default is 0.0 second, meaning
that caching negative lookups are disabled.
- attr_timeout=T
- The timeout in seconds for which file/directory attributes are cached. The
default is 1.0 second.
- ac_attr_timeout=T
- The timeout in seconds for which file attributes are cached for the
purpose of checking if auto_cache should flush the file data on
open. The default is the value of attr_timeout
- noforget
- remember=T
- Normally, libfuse assigns inodes to paths only for as long as the kernel
is aware of them. With this option inodes are instead assigned for at
least T seconds (or, in the case of noforget, the life-time
of the filesystem). This will require more memory, but may be necessary
when using applications that make use of inode numbers.
- modules=M1[:M2...]
- Add modules to the filesystem stack. Modules are pushed in the order they
are specified, with the original filesystem being on the bottom of the
stack.
mount.fuse3 options:
These options are interpreted by mount.fuse3 and are thus
only available when mounting a file system via mount.fuse3 (such as
when mounting via the generic mount(1) command or /etc/fstab).
Supported options are:
- setuid=USER
- Switch to USER and its primary group before launching the FUSE file
system process. mount.fuse3 must be run as root or with CAP_SETUID
and CAP_SETGID for this to work.
- drop_privileges
- Perform setup of the FUSE file descriptor and mounting the file system
before launching the FUSE file system process. mount.fuse3 requires
privilege to do so, i.e. must be run as root or at least with
CAP_SYS_ADMIN and CAP_SETPCAP. It will launch the file
system process fully unprivileged, i.e. without capabilities(7) and
prctl(2) flags set up such that privileges can't be reacquired
(e.g. via setuid or fscaps binaries). This reduces risk in the event of
the FUSE file system process getting compromised by malicious file system
data.
Modules are filesystem stacking support to high level API.
Filesystem modules can be built into libfuse or loaded from shared
object
Perform file name character set conversion. Options are:
- from_code=CHARSET
- Character set to convert from (see iconv -l for a list of possible
values). Default is UTF-8.
- to_code=CHARSET
- Character set to convert to. Default is determined by the current
locale.
Prepend a given directory to each path. Options are:
- subdir=DIR
- Directory to prepend to all paths. This option is mandatory.
- rellinks
- Transform absolute symlinks into relative
- norellinks
- Do not transform absolute symlinks into relative. This is the
default.
The fusermount3 program is installed set-user-gid to fuse. This is
done to allow users from fuse group 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:
- 1.
- The user can only mount on a mountpoint, for which it has write
permission
- 2.
- The mountpoint is not a sticky directory which isn't owned by the user
(like /tmp usually is)
- 3.
- No other user (including root) can access the contents of the mounted
filesystem.
FUSE filesystems are unmounted using the fusermount3(1)
command (fusermount3 -u mountpoint).
FUSE is currently maintained by Nikolaus Rath
<Nikolaus@rath.org>
The original author of FUSE is Miklos Szeredi
<mszeredi@inf.bme.hu>.
This man page was originally written by Bastien Roucaries
<roucaries.bastien+debian@gmail.com> for the Debian GNU/Linux
distribution.