i'm publishing the below way too early because i am likely to abandon it after something i briefly thought accidentally. but it was so exciting to get this far!
because this is so useful there's a reasonable chance that i will work on it again. also writing this idea because i didn't write it elsewhere: why don't remote mounts use inotify on the remote server to maintain a perfectly accurate cache? ~ blindingly faster than mosh ! ~ (if ever completed) https://github.com/xloem/chimerash # chimerash Hook your shell to run commands remotely. This is pre-alpha hobby tech-demo work for accessing a remote system in a faster-than-mosh kind of way. The system injects a .so into the running shell, which hooks execve and dispatches commands to the remote server running on an sshfs mount. It is only a very barebones demo that this is possible. It is possible to make even very slow remotes appear quite fast. Right now the code depends on https://github.com/pmem/syscall_intercept but other interception approaches (such as simple LD_PRELOAD) can be added by making a wrappers_*.cpp file for them. Similarly the only mount used right now is https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs and the only injection approach right now is batch commands to https://sourceware.org/gdb/ , both of which are also dependencies. ## usage As of 2024-12-31, the code can be tested using something like this: make test.so # note it's unlikely password login works atm so be sure to have public key authentication configured # also note sshfs takes many options that can significantly change experience. # on my very old version 2.10 the below existed. look for more options in newer versions. # -d -o cache_timeout=3600 -o entry_timeout=3600 -o negative_timeout=3600 -o attr_timeout=3600 -o max_write=10000000000 sshfs my_user@my_host:/ /my/mount/path bash . test.enable.source # tries to use gdb to inject .so into $$ (bash) cd /my/mount/path remoteexec # tries to place the user in their login folder on the local mount # here now run a binary that exists on the remote system, like ls -l or systemctl status exit I've only tested this on one obscure system! It's just a proof of concept!
