Ubuntu Manpage: fuse - configuration and mount options for FUSE file systems

NAME

       fuse - configuration and mount options for FUSE file systems

DESCRIPTION

       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.

DEFINITIONS

       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.

CONFIGURATION

       Some options regarding mount policy can be set in the file /etc/fuse.conf. Currently these options are:

       mount_max = NNN
              Set the maximum number of FUSE mounts allowed to non-root users. The default is 1000.

       user_allow_other
              Allow non-root users to specify the allow_other or allow_root mount options (see below).

       These limits are enforced by the fusermount3 helper, so they can be avoided by filesystems that run as
       root.

OPTIONS

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.

General mount options:
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 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 supports 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.

libfuse-specific mount options:
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.

This option is dangerous and should only be used after careful consideration of the risks.

Automatically unmounting the filesystem means that if the filesystem crashes the mountpoint may
suddenly appear empty, which may have unintended consequences. For example, a running backup and
mirroring program may conclude that all the data in the filesystem has been deleted and proceed to
propagate this deletion to the backup / remote system. If the mountpoint instead becomes
inaccessible (the default), most programs will behave correctly (report an error).

This feature may also accidentally unmount the wrong filesystem due to race conditions. For
example, if another filesystem was mounted underneath the same mountpoint, or if a new filesystem
is mounted after the FUSE process has crashed, it may accidentally get unmounted.

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.

High-level mount options:
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 fmask=M dmask=M
Override the permission bits set by the filesystem in st_mode. The resulting permission bits are
the ones missing from the mask value, which is given in octal representation. fmask and dmask
(respectively) may be used to control the permission bits of files and directories separately.
umask is overridden by the individual fmask and dmask options.

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.

FUSE MODULES (STACKING)

       Modules  are  filesystem stacking support to high level API. Filesystem modules can be built into libfuse
       or loaded from shared object

   iconv
       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.

   subdir
       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.

SECURITY

       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.

NOTE

       FUSE filesystems are unmounted using the fusermount3(1) command (fusermount3 -u mountpoint).

AUTHORS

       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.