On Sep 23, 2005, at 4:11 PM, Gerd Knops wrote:
The problem is that the OS X VFS implementation seems to be rather under-documented and auite the moving target [5]. It changed a lot for Tiger. It has developed independent from FreeBSD, so porting the FreeBSD Fuse driver is not at all trivial (lack of documentation again not helping).
... The ftpfs [2] on OS X uses yet another approach: It presents itself to the OS as an NFS server, and translates NFS to FTP. This may seem like a convoluted approach (and it is), but has the advantage that it can be completely implemented in user space, and the NFS protocol encapsulates it from changes in the kernels VFS implementation.
...
Erm, I'd like to point out that, as [5] mentions, in Tiger VFS's are now fairly well insulated from Kernel changes, and if I remember WWDC correctly, the Kernel changes in 10.4 should make things like VFS's a lot more forward-compatible. So it really isn't so much the moving target anymore.