Since I've been dormant for a while from this group's standpoint, several questions and speculations have piled up regarding MacFUSE's Snow Leopard status. I'm answering some questions in this post. Please read the whole thing carefully before jumping to further conclusions.
* What have I been up to? I've been busy with things other than MacFUSE. * What has the MacFUSE team been up to? The myth of the MacFUSE team has become rather annoying. There is no MacFUSE "team" and there never has been one. The MacFUSE distribution has the following components: 1. The command-line software updater/installer (autoinstaller) 2. The preference pane (MacFUSE.prefPane) 3. The Objective-C framework (MacFUSE.framework) 4. Everything else (kernel extension, user libraries, helper tools) Greg Miller and Dave MacLachlan wrote components 1 and 2, respectively, as *one time* favors to the project. Ted Bonkenburg wrote component 3. I take care of the rest. Since component 4 constitutes the core of the project and is the part that needs work (or the most work) when Mac OS X changes, if I have other higher priority things to do, things can stall with MacFUSE. Please realize that I have a full-time job (and MacFUSE is not it), a family, and several other pursuits besides MacFUSE. Also, I'm not even working on Mac stuff any more in my official job. I'll tell you about the "MacFUSE QA team" some other time. * What's the deal with MacFUSE on Snow Leopard? As far as I know, MacFUSE is fine on Snow Leopard as long as you run the 32-bit kernel. In particular, you can choose to write either a 32- bit or a 64-bit MacFUSE-based application because the 64-bit MacFUSE libraries should be fine. Under the 64-bit kernel, MacFUSE (at least the official release) shouldn't cause any problems because the kernel extension wouldn't even load. The 2008 December release did work with the 64-bit kernel. It was "experimental" because Snow Leopard itself was experimental then. Since then, things have changed with OS X and I've not had the time or the need to fix MacFUSE. I'll get to the 64-bit kernel part if/when I can. If you are a file system developer, there may be some other things to know about Snow Leopard and MacFUSE. One thing is about the larger stat structure on Snow Leopard. I think somebody on this forum posted about this--please look for that post. In short, if you compiled a previously working file system on Snow Leopard and it stops working completely (you get I/O errors even when trying to list the root directory of your file system), you've run into the stat structure issue. The MacFUSE libraries are compiled with Leopard compatibility, which means the smaller stat structure. The "ino64" version of the MacFUSE library *is* compiled with the larger stat structure. If you're going to run your file system binary on both Leopard and Snow Leopard, then you'll be compiling it with Leopard compatibility anyway (-mmacosx-version-min=10.5). Otherwise, use the ino64 library. * What about the reports of MacFUSE being "known to crash Snow Leopard"? Nobody has reported any crashes to me. I've only read some third-hand accounts in some threads on this forum. One of the following must be happening: - People don't know what they are talking about. - People are running a custom-compiled MacFUSE under a 64-bit kernel. Usually (barring certain types of memory corruption), a panic log will tell you the name of the kernel extension (if an extension was indeed involved) that caused the crash. * Custom-compiled MacFUSE under a 64-bit kernel? I noticed that some of you are compiling/distributing a MacFUSE kernel extension for the 64-bit kernel. Simply recompiling it is not going to work--a bunch of non-trivial work is needed. If you simply recompile it (by commenting out the #ifdef guards, as I believe folks did), it'll load under K64 and might even appear to work. But at best, you'll get a kernel panic, and at worst, you'll get data corruption. You can "test" this yourself under K64. Use the custom-compiled version to mount some file system with a bunch of files. Then, from multiple terminal windows, cause some continuous file activity, say, some 'find' loops. You should get a kernel panic in no time. Unless you are a kernel developer who wants to "hack" on MacFUSE, I wouldn't advise you recompile MacFUSE, specially the kernel extension. Even if you do, distributing it is likely to cause pain and confusion. Amit --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacFUSE" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macfuse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
