WinFsp – Windows File System Proxy

by mkotowski • 5 years ago

184 53 5 years ago

Wicher• 5 years ago

Could one easily distribute software that bundles this and have it installed by novice end users? What kind of permission granting seances would they have to go through, if any?

catwell• 5 years ago

You probably can and it won't be nearly as bad as what it is on MacOS. You only need a code signing certificate for drivers from Microsoft. You might not even need that if WinFSP provides signed binaries and you don't modify the driver part.

(Source: until 2 years ago I used to work at a company that did that using a proprietary driver - CBFS - and was looking at WinFSP to replace it.)

jkaplowitz• 5 years ago

You might not even need that if WinFSP provides signed binaries and you don't modify the driver part.

The README.md which the submission linked says that they do indeed provide signed binaries for every release.

mkotowski• 5 years ago

As for using it to create a new file system, the repository has a basic tutorial for that: https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfsp/blob/master/doc/WinFsp...

What kind of permission granting seances would they have to go through, if any?

From personal experience of using this: WinFSP have ready .msi installer. After going through the standard process of installing it, then you need to install the file system implementation you want (for example SSHFS from http://www.secfs.net/winfsp/rel/).

The required permissions amount to the standard installation prompt, at least from my experience on Windows 10.

hdjjhhvvhga• 5 years ago

In case anyone is wondering: if you want to use sshfs network drives as demoed on their Github page, WinFsp is not enough, you need to also install SSHFS-Win:

https://github.com/billziss-gh/sshfs-win/releases/tag/v3.5.2...

juangacovas• 5 years ago

Haven't tried the latest versions of WinFsp + SSHFS-Win, glad to see a new GUI for the later and new versions. My experience is good but if you have an unstable connection, the mapped drive didn't reconnect by itself at all times. For a better experience I've always relied on RaiDrive (free with Ads) or SFTP Drive from N software (free for non-commercial)

andix2• 5 years ago

Are there any ready to use file system implementations available?

icegreentea2• 5 years ago

http://www.secfs.net/winfsp/doc/Known-File-Systems/

I've personally only used SSHFS (years ago). It was ok - slightly flakey for me. I can't remember what was wonky, but it was like 98% working, I couldn't figure out the last bit, so I just switched to straight up SMB/samba (I had pretty free control of the remote end, so that was a reasonable solution).

Maybe I'll give SSHFS another try again now...

orhmeh09• 5 years ago

SSHFS has behaved a little jankily for me on Linux, too, since forever. I wonder if the protocol’s just not really up to the 2%.

michael-ax• 5 years ago

i'd love one for keepass and https://www.presslabs.com/docs/code/gitfs/ :)

andix2• 5 years ago

What should that actually do? Expose passwords as files?

ehPReth• 5 years ago

rclone - https://rclone.org/ uses this IIRC. Can mount a heck of a lot of things!

netheril96• 5 years ago

My work: https://github.com/netheril96/securefs

BiteCode_dev• 5 years ago

Oh, it has a FUSE compat layer too, that's pretty damn cool.

riedel3• 5 years ago

You can even implement a fuse server in cygwin, so many fuse implementations will straight forward compile from my experience.

oaiey• 5 years ago

And then it is GPL with exception for libre software or commercial license.

I hope they have reasonable commercial licensing.

DerekBickerton• 5 years ago

This might be handy for passing files to a virtual machine if you don't want to use Virtualbox's 'guest additions' software

jabiko• 5 years ago

Why wouldn't you want to use the VirtualBox guest additions? It's GPLv2 licensed and brings additional features that make using the VM easier.

joombaga• 5 years ago

You might not want to be locked in. I've used VirtualBox to build systems meant to eventually run elsewhere.

franga20002• 5 years ago

It's an absolute disaster for one. I haven't actually managed to get shared folders to work reliably in years. It ended up being faster and more reliable to run Samba on the host and connect over a virtual network.

Some of the other features of course can't easily be duplicated with other tools and they work decent-ish anyways so there's no reason to try, but shared folders aren't one of them.

riedel3• 5 years ago

Actually WSL2 might be a better target as it would enable some tweaking of the mapping. Did anyone have success implementing virtio communication through hyperv and mount e.g. a custom p9fs. E.g. to support ownership and attributes. What would be the best p9fs server to start with? I had limited success with p9fs on winfsp from cygwin some time ago due to the problems of mapping effective access rights correctly.

piscisaureus• 5 years ago

I found https://github.com/pfpacket/rust-9p to be reasonably good and easy to hack on. My fork (https://github.com/piscisaureus/rust-9p) has some patches to improve support for the 9P2000.W dialect used by Windows.

chajath• 5 years ago

It's interesting to note that WSL uses 9p to mount the filesystem on Windows. Had MSFT taken a more FOSS-friendly approach, we could've had a burgeoning FUSE ecosystem built around 9p.

WorldMaker• 5 years ago

The WSL team in their GitHub have teased experiments with allowing the 9p server to do more outside of WSL and be an open protocol for Windows moving forward. Given Windows' backwards compatibility mandates, you may be able to understand why they are taking a slow and deliberate exploration process to figure out how much that is something they want to support in Windows moving forward (especially if it escapes the realm of "developer tools" where they feel they have more freedom).

solarkraft• 5 years ago

Cool, the third version of FUSE for Windows …

api• 5 years ago

APFS (Apple Filesystem) on MacOS has some kind of file provider API too. Here's one app that uses it:

https://www.expandrive.com/strongsync/

pjmlp2• 5 years ago

Windows already has similar native APIs, why bother with this?

AkshitGarg• 5 years ago

It also has a FUSE compat layer which maybe useful when porting existing *nix software

pjmlp2• 5 years ago

Ah ok.

shadowfox• 5 years ago

Out of curiosity: what sort of apis are we talking about?

jodrellblank• 5 years ago

Maybe this one?

"The Windows Projected File System (ProjFS) allows a user-mode application called a "provider" to project hierarchical data from a backing data store into the file system, making it appear as files and directories in the file system. For example, a simple provider could project the Windows registry into the file system, making registry keys and values appear as files and directories, respectively. An example of a more complex provider is VFS for Git, which is used to virtualize very large git repos." - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/projfs/projec...

or this one?

"Starting in Windows 10, version 1709, Windows provides the cloud files API. This API consists of several native Win32 and WinRT APIs that formalize support for cloud sync engines, and handles tasks such as creating and managing placeholder files and directories." - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/cfapi/cloud-f...

vlovich1232• 5 years ago

In most of the benchmarks down it outperforms NTFS. What’s going on there?

sam0x174• 5 years ago

It turns out it's actually very easy to outperform off-the-shelf file systems depending on what your metric is. I discovered this when I was developing BitFort (abandoned project) which made use of WinFsp on Windows and pure FUSE on Linux. In my case the secret was having all the paths available in a fast in-memory data structure. I was dealing with a remote cloud file system, yet I was able to open up folders and browse around the file system faster than NTFS can with LOCAL file systems because every path and the MIME type is already in memory. For some applications (i.e. if you have trillions of small files) this might be a memory hog but for most I imagine it would be just fine. Seems like something OSes should have a toggleable option for...

mikevm2• 5 years ago

BitFort sounds interesting - is the source code available?

Also, what did you use to build your awesome looking resume page? https://resume.sam0x17.dev/ :)

jpeloquin• 5 years ago

According to the docs [0] it's in part due to an unequal comparison: "[WinFsp] outperforms NTFS in most scenarios (an unfair comparison as NTFS is a disk file system and WinFsp is tested with an in-memory file system)." I guess the point is just that WinFsp is fast enough for practical use.

[0] https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfsp/blob/master/doc/WinFsp...

vlovich1232• 5 years ago

Yeah, I assumed it was going to be an in-memory comparison but that’s super misleading and doesn’t let one get a sense of the overhead of the system itself.

R0b0t1• 5 years ago

As mentioned in other comments it is an unequal comparison, but it's easy to outperform NTFS on Windows as the NTFS driver has some serious lock contention issues that make directory enumeration slow.

sam0x174• 5 years ago

Used this extensively when I was working on BitFort (abandoned project). It's really solid. If you're open source you can use the whole thing no problem. If you're closed source, a commercial license costs around $5k.

_def• 5 years ago

Is it maybe possible to use ext3/ext4 rw on windows 10 with this?

Rucadi• 5 years ago

You can already do that using WSL2 mount.

After mounting an ext3-4 drive, you can RW into it using the file explorer.

galkk• 5 years ago

Only in insider builds.

wsl --mount is not available in current release

coldacid2• 5 years ago

So other than having FUSE compatibility, why this rather than Dokan?

riedel3• 5 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13126987

coldacid2• 5 years ago

A benchmark from nearly five years ago means nothing today.

rkagerer• 5 years ago

I played with Dokan in its early days. It was promising, but I found it a little buggy. (Not sure if that remained true once it matured more)

MichaelGroves• 5 years ago

It outperforms NTFS in most scenarios (an unfair comparison as NTFS is a disk file system and WinFsp is tested with an in-memory file system)

Oh good grief! Let me guess, they first benchmarked it against a ram disk, but the resulting graphs didn't look so impressive so they scrapped that and decided to benchmark it against a disk, which they admit was unfair, just to get the impressive looking graphics.

WinFsp – Windows File System Proxy

Related Stories